Loved - A Novel (21 page)

January, 2006.

              The first week of the New Year, Chad had daily band practices in order to get ready for a show where they were going to debut a lot of new material. 

              “I think this will be good for us to have a little time apart,” he said.  “I’ll miss you, though.” 

I thought it was strange; the week was long and uncomfortable. Usually, we stayed the night together or at the very least, we were each other’s first and last call of the day.  However, during that week, he didn’t call much, blaming long practices and too much time spent trying to get some of his equipment fixed. He kept reminding me that it was good for us to have space.

              I didn’t want space. I wanted to know why this was happening.  Then, I got my wish and I wanted to take it back.

              The day before the show, Chad asked me to stop by his apartment. I sat on the living room floor with him, so glad to see him after our first ever week apart, but he never took his eyes of the guitar that he was re-stringing.

              That’s when I first saw what was coming, why he’d asked me to come over.

“I think we should take a break,” he said. “I’ve just been feeling a lot of pressure saving money for a ring and talking about getting married and I’m not sure that I’m ready for all of that.” He said that he needed to sort some things out for himself before he could imagine being married. Was it time for him to give up the dream of being a musician? What was he doing with his life?

              On that one, I agreed. What
was
he doing with his life?  And why did he have to make these decisions without me?  Wasn’t the point of building a life together exactly that?
Our
life together? I was the opposite of the people in
The Quarterlife Crisis
book, and here I was in love with a guy who was having a quarter-life crisis. I couldn’t understand what was wrong with him; he was the one who was always talking about getting married!

              I felt stupid to have believed this would be effortless.  I felt scared that a break was really the end. I felt angry that he was hurting me and that he didn’t believe in us like I did. I decided that I would have to have enough faith for the both of us. Then, I went numb. I turned my heart off and switched on the autopilot.

              “Okay,” I said. “Do what you need to do I guess. Just, call me when you want. I won’t call you. You’re the one who wants space.”

              I put my coat on, walked to my car, turned the key, and drove home. I walked to my door, went inside and lay down on my bed. 

              Then, I fell apart.

              At first I thought I was going to die. My heart was beating so fast for days that I thought finally it might explode.  I threw up what little food I ate. I cried and I didn’t sleep. I called off work and then called Chad to officially break up with him. I just couldn’t take the waiting. I thought it was inevitable and I wanted to get it over with. He assured me that the break was just that—a break—so I agreed to wait it out.  However, I needed some parameters. If I couldn’t understand why this change was necessary, at least I could have some control over the guidelines of our new arrangement. We were still together; we would call each other and could still say “I love you,” but we wouldn’t hang out much.

              Everyone seemed to think this was about Chad having cold feet. “Men have trouble making big decisions when they are based on emotion. He’ll come around,” Dad said. The Jamison’s had been through a time apart before they were married, Mrs. Jamison told me. This is normal.

              I prayed a lot. I didn’t want to be with Chad if that was truly not what God wanted for me but then why did I feel so much love for him?

              “You can rejoice in that love,” my pastor told me.  “God blessed you with being able to feel that way about someone, whether or not the feelings are returned.” 

              Wait, the feelings aren’t returned?

              I read an article in
Elle Magazine
called “How to be Single,” in which the writer declared that Lean Cuisine and
Law and Order
reruns are better than dying.
I do love Law and Order
, I thought. The article got me thinking about what I could do during the break that would help me grow. I could get back into yoga, painting and writing. Somehow, with Chad, I never got to do any of those things. All I had been doing was playing wife. I decided I would fill the emptiness in me with God and with paint.

              Some days, Chad would call and say he wanted me back. I’d tell him that I had to think about it. I was guarding my heart now that I knew what kind of damage he could do to it. I didn’t trust him. Some days, he’d call and say he still didn’t know what he wanted. I told him that he had to want to be with me so badly that he couldn’t stand it or I wasn’t interested.

              I had told him that I wasn’t going to call him; he would have to contact me. He wanted space and I was going to give it to him. He wouldn’t hear from me at all. But I was so sick. I wasn’t eating, sleeping or getting any work done. Even worse, I was waking up with heart palpitations and nausea every morning, choking into the toilet at 6:00 a.m. and then crying in bed until I absolutely had to get up for work. My first conscious thought every morning was that something was terribly wrong. And it was.

              Chad never left me alone for long. A few days would go by and he would text me, “You’re still my tiny peanut,” or send me a picture of our partially constructed condo with the caption “home.” I would become so excited that he still loved me and still thought that I was his future, and then I wouldn’t hear anything for days.

              Eventually, he told me he had met someone. He didn’t expect it, he said. “It wasn’t a big deal,” he was just taking advantage of the opportunity to see someone else so that he could be sure that I was the one. He was seeing someone else. To be more sure. That I was the one.

              I knew it wasn’t right, but I had committed myself to this man and I didn’t know how to detach myself. I was trying to be sympathetic, understanding and courageous but I was sympathetic, understanding and courageous with our best interest in mind. Not my own. I couldn’t bear to think of myself that way. One single person. Without him. 

              So I waited.

              I wrote to myself as if I was writing to Chad.

I wish I could call you. You would sleepily say “Heeeey,” and I’d say, “Hi,” and you’d say “What’s wrong?” “I can’t sleep.” I woke up and I can’t stop thinking about you and my heart’s pounding too fast for me to fall back asleep. It’s like...You know how I tell you that you make my heart swell? Well, without you it’s too tiny and has to work extra hard to pump blood through my body. It’s been hammering away for an hour, and I feel so cold.  I can’t stop shaking.

              I listened to Lori McKenna. “Well I never told you to love me, that’s your sort of greed.” I listened to Patty Griffin.  “Let’s take a walk on the bridge, right over this mess.” I listened to everyone tell me it would be all right and I pretended to believe them. I listened to everyone but myself.

              In the past, knowing that Chase was still out there would have been a comfort to me. Maybe our paths would cross again. Maybe we were meant to be together and had just been apart for a while—for some greater purpose. But Chase wasn’t there anymore and the
what-ifs
began pouring in. What if I had fought harder for Chase when I had the chance? Would he still be here? Would we be together and happy and I wouldn’t be hurting and broken and sick and he wouldn’t be gone? If Chad wasn’t the one and Chase was gone, what would become of me?

             
February, 2006
.

              Sophie, Lacey and I began planning weekly girls’ nights. Sometimes it was hard for me to do anything but focus on holding back my tears for one evening, but on other nights the girls really helped me escape from my nightmare.

              One night, while on my way, Lacey called me from where we were supposed to be meeting.

              “Kim, I went in to the sushi place next door to use the bathroom and Chad is there. I just wanted you to know.”

              I had always hated their sushi.

              “Well, I’m a block away so I’m coming,” I said. “I doubt they’ll come over to the bar.”

              “Okay,” Lacey replied.

              When it came to break-ups, I generally thought ignorance was bliss, especially with how sick this was making me.  I made it a life-saving point not to look on his Myspace page for fear of what I might or might not find. I didn’t want to know her name or anything about her. However, on this particular night, I had a moment of weakness.

Lacey told me that they were visible through the window of the restaurant. She said that if I was absolutely sure that I wanted to see them, she would walk with me and show me where they were sitting. We walked towards the restaurant and then I stopped short. I stood there for a moment looking at the street. He didn’t love me anymore. He was on a date with another girl. He wasn’t mine. I wasn’t his.  The thoughts were so strange. I knew that I needed to see it to believe it.

              “Okay, where?” I asked, turning towards the window. 

              They were at the sushi bar and I could see the back of their heads. I saw his dark hair covered by a brown ball cap. I saw that he was wearing a shirt that I bought him.

I saw her curly red ponytail.

              I swear it was the train that kept me alive those months. I would go to bed so early—beyond exhausted from working hard just to breathe in and out all day, from the effort that it took to get through one hour without dissolving into tears. I was in bed by eight o’clock, sometimes seven. I would lie in bed awake, feeling like I was on the ocean floor, waiting for sleep to wash over me like a wave. But the tide just wouldn’t take me.

              Alone in the silence, no longer having the distractions of work to do or the voices of loved ones on the phone pumping me with encouragement, I would be overtaken by hysteria and cry until I physically ached. Then, at 10:00pm, between whimpers, I would hear the train. In the cold darkness, my friend whistled, wanting so badly to be heard by anyone who would listen. The train was lonely too.  I wasn’t alone. Only then, each night, did a wave of relief wash over me, bringing sleep at last.

              Still, come morning, my eyes would fly open at dawn, hot tears pouring from them. My heart would race faster than I believed was possible and the adrenaline would make me nauseous. Over and over again. I couldn’t understand how my heart could beat so fast if I was lying completely still and if I had been asleep just moments before.  It was as if I was running from the hurt in my dreams. Trying to control my heart, I concentrated on each breath. In slowly. Out slowly. Still, I felt so sick that I would rush to the bathroom and dry heave into the toilet, saliva and tears falling into the waiting water. I never could get anything to come out of my empty stomach, as I was only able to eat every three days or so.

              Sophie, precious Sophie, never once made me feel at fault for being so sick. It had to be horrible for her to wake up every day to the sound of me in the bathroom. I felt so guilty that I never purposely woke her to talk or ask her to sit with me. I gave her as much silence and space as I could manage.  If my distance would keep her kind, I would give her that.

              It was hard for me too, being able to see in her eyes that she didn’t recognize me. I didn’t recognize myself either, and that was difficult enough to bear. It wasn’t that loving Chad had changed me, it was losing him, and it changed me so completely that it was as if my entire DNA had been reconstructed.

             
March, 2006.

              Finally, I went to a doctor. Emotionally, I had good days and bad days, but physically I was so ill that I was rapidly losing weight, unable to eat or sleep and still having panic attacks in the morning. 

              “My boyfriend and I broke up or are on a break or something, so I thought I was just upset about that, but it’s been two months,” I told the doctor. 

              The doctor ran heart tests, blood tests and asked me all kinds of questions about my many symptoms. I went from just being below my highest weight ever, 140 pounds, to less than 120 pounds in two months. It wasn’t that I was choosing not to eat, rather, it was that I was either flat out not hungry or I would be so sick in the mornings that anything I had eaten came back up. I was rail thin. Sophie called me a bobble-head because my head looked too big for my skin-and-bones body.             

              The doctor called with the results. I had hyperthyroidism, he said, which accounted for the anxiety attacks, low appetite and high metabolism. He explained that my thyroid regulated all of these things and its over-activity from stress had me all out of whack. Instead of putting me on a medication to regulate the thyroid itself, the doctor put me on anti-anxiety medication. “Hyperthyroidism is common among divorced women,” he told me. “This kind of severe emotional stress can cause the thyroid to overwork.” If my anxiety levels are regulated, he said, my thyroid should fix itself.

              The
Lexapro
would take two weeks to work into my system, but little by little I started to function like a regular member of society again.

              Still, work was too much for me to handle. I couldn’t focus. I needed a change of environment where I wasn’t in a still, dim office all day, and where I could be around more people and be under less pressure. So I left a job that I loved and went back to work in retail.