[This is part 3 of a 6 part story I am sharing about the rise & fall of an on and off again relationship I had every hope & dream of being in for the rest of my life, if we could just get it together..that ultimately, physically ended 60 days before I left the province and country for an undetermined amount of time.]
Since we still had not seen each other again up until this point all of our conversing happened over a little known app called “BBM”.. you may or may not know it (lol).
So as he put it, over one of our conversations
“there is no easy way to say this so I am just going to say a ‘picture tells a thousand words'” and then he hit send.
What I then received was a picture of him holding a little girl that looked exactly like him.
No amount of guessing, speculating or knowing could have prepared me for that moment where perhaps if the ground could have come and swallowed me up I may have been less blindsided & dumbfounded in complete shock.
I love children and there is no doubt my heart loved him, but a child that was his.. after me, but not with me, who was his mini twin… still the thought alone makes my head spin. She was adorable, he was everything I had once wanted more than anything and my heart broke with the complete loss of hope for how things would be again.
The investigator within me had a million questions, the kind compassionate side of me congratulated him, and then I began with the interrogating.
She was exactly 1 year old when we started talking again. If I did my math correctly this child was conceived at pretty much the exact time I too had begun having sex with him.
It felt like I was living in another dimension for a little while. Like in a parallel universe someone else was living the exact life I wanted, felt, planned.
Because, in the spirit of being really fucking real here, after he left I didn’t get my period for an entire month. Stress clearly played a role, but as someone who is highly intuitive and an empath I feel there were other forces at play here that started to bind the entire last year and a half together, but not without many holes in the fabric that was our lives. I knew there was a baby, she just wasn’t mine.
Was he committed to me at that time? Verbally no, but in all other aspects I would give it a big yes. So was he being dishonest? Was everything we ever shared just a lie? Was everything I felt, once again not real?
How do I say yes to seeing this guy again who now has a daughter with a woman he told me he had lost romantic interest in? How do I see a guy who had a child with someone while my heart was still aching in his absence? How do I even believe him when he said he wanted to stay with me but had to do the right thing?
The right thing.. that’s where the story gets tricky again.
His story went like this: She reappeared in his life after an apparent summer away and told him she was pregnant. I am not going to get into math, timelines or other details here but if you were me in that moment you would probably be thinking ‘this doesn’t even make fucking sense.’ Between alleged conception and birth the dates did not line up.
Of course I asked a million questions and of course he soothed my doubts and fears with answers that I can only say made perfect sense to a heart that so badly wanted to believe.
This is just another part of this story where I could have opted out. I had spent 1.5 years away from him, I was doing great, on my path, loving my life and truly had begun to resolve to a life without him, and his life just got way more complicated than ever. The wise thing to do would be to decline further invitation to reconcile.
But my fairytale wanting heart kicked in and thoughts of how divine intervention brought us back together and how he was now single and his story of being torn between doing the right thing or staying with me had plagued him but he knew what he had to do, tugged at my heart strings.
So slowly I eased my way into the idea of seeing him again, this time immersing myself in the knowing that he was no longer just him. That he not only had a child now but he had a year and a half of life changing love, growth and heartbreak on his slate too.
He told me I would love his daughter, that she was sensitive and he knew I would appreciate that. This coming from a guy who I am sure had not shed a tear in probably 15 years and wasn’t the most attentive. It was moments like that where I knew he had been paying attention and I fed into it ravenously.
I cautiously agreed to see him again.
Our first day back together again consisted of a walk on the beach.. with a stroller, a BBQ dinner that we ate cold because Daddy duty called every 5 minutes, and a very (hourly) interrupted sleep.
Yes I slept there, because It was 1.5 hours away from home and the night went way later than planned and the bottom line is it really did feel like no time had passed between us. Despite my guarded heart he still gave me those butterflies I had been missing for so long and he still smiled in a way that made me weak in the knees and he still made me laugh like he was a comedian and I was his most devoted fan – a truth that to this day would never cease, some people are just born funny I suppose.
But as for the rest of it, nothing would ever be the same again. As is to be expected with a 1 year old in the mix. A 1 year old who was the spitting image of him and a constant reminder of the day my heart broke when he walked away for someone else, and multiplied. A 1 year old that would grow up to be her own little person and find a way into my heart but never, ever, without the aching reminder of what was forever lost between her Dad and I.
Even with all of his relentless effort to talk to me, see me and somehow create space for me in his life, he was still doubtful and uncertain in so many areas that made moving forward nearly impossible.
We didn’t talk about us, we didn’t talk about a future, we just sat in limbo and remained there for the next 4 years as I hopelessly devoted myself to him, our story and what I had dreamed would be our eventual happily ever after. Because most fairytales have a rocky start anyways right?
Visiting him became questionable when one night he asked me to park my car in a parking lot down the road. He was concerned about the repercussions he would face from his daughters momma if she knew he was dating again while their child was still so young. I can’t say I could put myself in his shoes, but I can say that the shoes I was in felt like they were sinking in deep, dirty shit.
Speaking of shoes, as I obliged and parked my car down the road one night to avoid any possible drama and of course appease the man who knew how to make me weak in the knees more than anyone or anything else in the world and who made all of my cares disappear the moment I was in his arms, I left my unquestionably girly pink shoes at his front door as we went to bed. Only to come out the next morning almost unable to find them, until I did some further digging and found them tucked snugly under a sweater near the front door.
To be continued….
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