My Life Without You

I have been trying to decide how to write this and if I want to write this post for quite some time. I have started it and erased it and started it again and every time it was too hard. Tonight as I was driving alone to get to a home where I live alone I passed the place that we used to live together. For a minute it hurt to breathe...again. This is something that happens more frequently than I care to but admit. I try to take deep breaths and there is an actual pain. I never knew till recently that expression "hurts to breathe" was so literal. For a minute I did not feel like I was ok and memories from not long ago hit me in a way that I did not expect. It's not like you have been gone for years or even that many months but I always think I am getting better and then BAM out of nowhere there is a memory or someone says something and it's a huge setback. I admit that the setbacks are taking less and less time to recover from and depending on the depth of the setback I can sometimes push it so far inside of me that it barely affects me. This is me now: if the hurt is not too bad then I can ignore it enough to keep living. If the pain is especially bad I use my survival skills to live life until I can get home and hide. So I drove by our old home and our memories and I cried a little. I hate going to a home where I live alone and where I feel like there is no purpose. I loved being your wife and having a home and a husband to care for. I miss all of the stupid things that I thought I hated. I miss doing your laundry and not being home till after ten so we could have clean clothes for work. I miss coming home and having two days of dishes to do because I was too lazy to do it over the weekend. I miss making the huge bed and picking up your dirty socks off of your side of the bed. Those things annoyed me in the moment but honestly it gave me some purpose. I came home and had something to do and someone to do it for and now I come home and Im not sure what to even do. I feel lonely alot of the time, even when I am with other people. This is my new life. My life without you. Without you I am weirdly single. I don't have you and so I am alone but I have been made a wife and I will always have that mentality. I don't think like a single girl anymore and I do not think that I will ever again. When I love again I will need a husband not a boyfriend. I am not ever going to be that cutesy girl looking for a boy. This sounds funny but its still true when I say you made me a woman and there is no going back from that. Without you I am still a woman, I am just a woman without her better half. That's another new thing in my life without you; people say that I am better off without you. They are wrong. Who is ever better off without the person they gave their life to? I know I will be ok because every time my heart breaks again and I cry all night again, I still wake up in the morning with my heart beating. You didn't kill me, you didn't permanently break me down so yeah, I will be ok. The best thing would have been you being the man I know you are. The best thing would be you realizing who you are in truth and not acting on how you feel in the moment. I would be better off with the real you but since you have decided to live in a lie, I will be ok without you. My life without you is so different and every single day is something new that I have to figure out on my own. I know how to put windshield wiper fluid in my car now. I learned how to play euchre. I have become someone that I like better because I have learned how to be a strong person and how to live my life no matter what. You no longer make me feel like I am not enough because I know that I was not the issue and that I gave you the best of me. I realize that the issue is you and who you have decided to be. It doesn't make it easier to live in general but it makes it easier to be without you. So many things are so different without you. So many things I am figuring out all on my own. I sleep alone without being afraid...most of the time. Much like when we lived together but you weren't there at night I still turn on every light in the rooms that I could possibly have to walk in to. I remember when we first got married and I thought it was so weird to sleep with someone and then after a very short time I couldn't sleep without you. I always had to feel that you were near me no matter how annoyed you got that I was on your side of the bed. It was like in my heart I was always afraid to lose you and when I would say it out loud you would tell me that you weren't going anywhere and that whether it be hunting or the fishing trip or work that took you away, you would always come back. The day you walked out and left me crying on the bed that was all I could think about because that was the one promise I needed you to keep. In my life without you I cannot go to bed unless I am ready to sleep. When we first got married we would watch shows or movies and then go to bed and even if I was not tired I liked going to bed with you, knowing you were there. Then our lives changed and you started slipping away and you would not be home alot when I was going to bed. During that time I would go to bed early just so that I could sleep away the time until you would come home. When you would come home sometimes you wouldn't even acknowledge me but I felt better knowing that you came home. When you actually left and up to now I cannot go to bed until I can sleep through the night because waking up in the dark alone is like remembering all over again that you left. It has gotten better, now that I am used to this home. Alot of things have gotten better and honestly although I miss our home together, I don't think I could have stayed there alone for long with all of our memories. Before you actually left but after you told me you wanted to I would come home everyday and look for your stuff to make sure you hadn't left yet. I lived in a constant panic that one day I would come home and all of your stuff would be gone. Every single day I checked your closet and to see if your shoes were in the hallway and every day when they were still there I would be able to breathe a little easier knowing I had one more day to try and change your mind. In my new life without you I have gotten past all of that and now I do not have to come home and search my house for your stuff. It is hard to be without you but that back then was so much harder. In my life without you, I worry but I am not home waiting alone for you to come back. I still cry so many tears for you but not like I did in the beginning. I worry for you. My heart misses you so much even though my head tells me that I am ok. I miss so many things and all of the good is what I choose to remember. When I remember the end it is bad and it makes me hurt and angry and I am constantly reminding myself that the man who did that is not the man that I married. If I can keep that straight then I can forgive all of the pain that you caused. If I can keep in mind that you didn't do this to hurt me and that I was just affected by the harm you are doing to yourself then I can keep myself where I need to be. If I can remember that who you are in truth is a perfect man and a good man then I can pray for you the way I am supposed to. My life without you is so different, not all bad just different. So tonight as I passed by our memories and my heart broke again and I cried again I just kept driving onto my new home and my new life without you. A few miles beyond the hurt and the memories I looked at my life and I checked myself. I was not bleeding or broken physically, I was not dying. I am alive and I have a long time left to be alive and so I brushed my tears away and breathed a deep breath and thanked God that unlike you, I am really ok and there are times when I am really happy. I do not have it all figured out yet but I am learning to live my life without you.