A Love Story: Part II

As time passed, she noticed a pattern in his disappearances: he always left when she was at her most vulnerable; when she needed him, her ‘rock’, the most. She knew she wasn’t very good at expressing her own feelings, but she believed him when he said that he wanted to understand her, so she kept trying. She tried different methods of expressing herself, but they all seemed to backfire. Whenever she attempted to share emotions other than joy and love, especially pertaining to their relationship, her feelings were so intense that they would leak out her eyes as tears, unstoppable, and he would fix her with an accusatory, unflinching stare, and give ultimatums: telling her to quit being crazy, and that he couldn’t be around her if she was going to feel like that. When she would pause, searching for the right words to use, he would finish her sentences with things that were so far off base from how she truly felt that it shocked her. Was she really THAT bad at expressing herself? She guessed so. With her wounds already torn open and bleeding, her soul exposed and vulnerable, his words and that judgmental stare were salt – stinging and cruel. When she expressed a need, he would tell her she was wrong, and that what she actually needed was something he had decided she needed. Or perhaps he had projected his needs onto her, assuming that their needs were identical, not considering that she was a different person, who had had different life experiences, resulting in different needs.

It was torture. He had no problem expressing himself – it came easily and naturally, like he had every reason in the world to expect to be understood and have his wishes and feelings respected without question. And she did respect him, and made huge efforts to understand him–leaps of faith, really–especially when it didn’t make any sense to her. That was par for the course of love, to her. Because she loved him so strongly, she naturally craved to understand him, to connect deeply. Likewise, she craved to be understood by him. But she couldn’t figure out how to replicate it in reverse. How could she get him to understand her, to respect her wishes and feelings? Did he only say that he wanted to because it was expected of him, rather than something he genuinely wanted? Or was she imagining things? Had he never actually said that he wanted to understand her? Had she just assumed that he operated that way, because she did and couldn’t fathom another way to be? Were they doing the same thing to each other, blind to the paradox? He once told her that she should never walk away from someone who needed her, but he routinely walked away from her when she needed him. Either she had failed to effectively communicate that she needed him, so he didn’t know, or he just didn’t care; maybe he didn’t see her as a complete person – only a two-dimensional idea? A walking amalgamation of tits and ass and orifices, whose responsibility it was to be available whenever and however and to whomever he desired. Her feelings on the matter, irrelevant. Or non-existent. Or just plain wrong.

She feared he was right. That she wasn’t a complete person, that her only value was as an object. That her feelings really were stupid and wrong and crazy, and that she had no right to expect to be understood by him, or to expect him to respect her wishes. In fact, what right did she even have to have wishes, let alone want them fulfilled? She should count herself lucky that a man–any man–would even have this fat, ugly, crazy ginger. As horrible as such thoughts sounded to her on an intellectual level, they rang true emotionally, deep down in that black, broken pit of her soul, and she feared that it was her own brokenness that had taught him to treat her that way. It wasn’t fair to expect him to see her any differently than she saw herself.