“Sometimes things just don’t work out.”
Ah. The most typical explanation for any given break up.
Standing in the middle of his bedroom with your toothbrush and spare contact lens case in hand, your mind begins to spin with a thousand questions, the most burning of them being, why?
You leave his building in a fit of frustration. You can barely wrap your mind around what just happened. A few days later, despite your better judgment, you demand to meet up and begin to beg for answers. You think that if you can get to the root of the problem, you’ll be able to fix things.
Well, you thought wrong.
The boy who just left you is a coward. He is nothing close to a man. He chose to walk away without having the decency to make sense of his own feelings and explain them to you. Instead, he chose to leave. He can’t give you an explanation because he doesn’t have one. He’s afraid to search for answers, because when he finally finds them, he’ll realize that it was his fault all along.
You blame yourself as you try to fill in the missing pieces of your split. You think back to all the bad things: the fights, the slip ups, the everyday irritations. You become a prisoner of your own mind as you retrace steps and calculate mishaps until you finally pinpoint the exact moment when things stopped “working out.” You wholeheartedly convince yourself that it was you who unknowingly pushed the relationship past its breaking point.
He will let you go on like this, driven mad by his dastardly silence as he frees himself of a guilty conscience and any trace of imperfection. He will mask his cowardice in seemingly sweet reassurances, telling you that you are “stronger than this,” and that it’s “time to move on.” He will ask you to move along, because he cannot be bothered with dealing with the standard protocol of how to leave a meaningful relationship like an adult.
No matter how deeply he said he loved you when you were together, the truth of the matter is that he does not respect you, and he never did. A half decent man would not let someone he once cared about walk around with a heavy heart and a troubled mind. A man who truly valued you would make sure that you understood everything there is to be understood before turning his back on you for the very last time.
So do yourself a favor, and be your own closure. Know that he was right: you are strong enough to walk away from the pain that he caused you. Refuse to let his cowardice weigh you down by holding your head up high and letting go of the blame that has burdened you for far too long.
Believe that one day, you will find someone who respects you. And he’ll be there to stand by you as your search for the answers to the better questions of life, together.
