by RDA
Before getting on the plane to Vilnius, M told me he was scared: he did not want to relive what had happened a few years earlier.
I told him explicitly that either we should get past that and start afresh, or we should end it once and for all.
I believe that he never put a stone on it, while I deluded myself that we could go on ignoring what happened.
We met again.
The last time we met in person, I asked him if he wanted to be with me. He told me that he was afraid of distance and that, having never been in a relationship, he did not know how to handle it. I asked him if he wanted to try and he seemed to understand that he did.
While M was stuck in a hotel because of a sandstorm. We called each other. I don’t know how, but an argument broke out and shortly afterwards we disconnected the call.
M disappeared for three weeks.
Three weeks in which I completely turned my life upside down. I left Vilnius for a new job that allowed me to work from anywhere in the world, and therefore also from where he was.
Three weeks in which I thought and rethought about what could have possibly gone off in his head to disappear like that. And then I wrote to him telling him how I felt. His reply hurt me so much.
For all summer, I thought about him so much. I was tormented by a thousand questions. I thought about what had happened. I came to the conclusion that he did not want me in the same way that I wanted him. And that was the only explanation I could give without offending him or myself.
In September 2022, I found myself at the airport in Vilnius and burst into tears. I put my pride aside and called him.
It was the worst conversation of my life. He strutted around alluding to how great his life was and how many women wanted him. I, dumbfounded, told him that the reason for the call was something else and that I thought he had got there. We talked. I asked him all the questions. M did not answer, instead he repeated several times that if ‘we had broken up’ it was because I had decided so.
Stupidly, I tried to make him understand that even if it were true (because I do not deny it) that it was I who had put an end to our story, he was also to blame.
And so, ironically, to the rhetorical question “so is this it?”, he replied “you decide”.
Needless to say, M and I are no longer together.
Letting him go was one of the hardest decisions I have made. We can say, I broke my own heart.
As I wrote our story, I realised how many ‘red flags’ I had missed, or deliberately ignored. And as Jill Telford said, ‘the signs you ignore in the beginning end up being the reasons you leave later’. Don’t ignore them.
© RDA 2023-03-21