The love we have became the love we had...

I am struggling with heavy feelings today. I've white-knuckled my way through and now the loss, the grief, is rushing in all at once. 

I am saddened. There is little I find myself able to think about other than the life I had been promised. A life ended abruptly. Snuffed out with these hands.  

Who am I, then? If not wife, partner, hostess of our parties, planner of our futures? Who do I become in the hollow space where once I was the enviable trophy, wife of an attorney, half of the couple proving everyone wrong and really making it? 

We traveled the world together. We bought an old house and made it our home. We adopted unwanted cats and dogs and made them our children. We bought a boat and together we named it. The city belonged to us. 

"Better times," we told ourselves for years, "are just around the corner." We never could quite catch up with them though, could we? Real togetherness was the can we kept kicking 

I know I had to leave. I know it in my bones. I was so often unhappy. It spilled out into every area of our lives. We just couldn't bridge the gap. Too different, I suppose. All our love and our accumulated hurts so  endlessly lost in translation. The anger and resentment and frustration boiling just beneath the surface of every failed exchange.

I wish it hadn't gotten so bad. I wish I'd been able to keep hoping. I wish I hadn't failed to keep my promises. I wish you hadn't failed to keep yours. I wish we hadn't smothered our love in obligations and performance and denial.

I sacrificed everything for this aching freedom. I relinquished comfort, security, my guaranteed Future, the only safety net I ever knew. Now there is only resigned terror. 

Nothing makes sense anymore. I don't know who I am. Who I am supposed to be. What I'm supposed want. How do I move forward when I don't have a plan? How do I prepare for what I can't foresee? What do I do with this haunting? Missing you and us and the life we lied and promised that we were making? How do I escape the ghosts of lives that never will be lived?