Ending the first and only good relationship of my life was not a decision I made lightly. I agonized over it for weeks. I spent so many nights staring up at the ceiling, too distressed to fall asleep. I could hardly bring myself to eat anything, and when I did, it was like nothing I ate had taste. In the end, however, I still ended things.
I still remember the look on his face when I left him standing alone in our once shared apartment. To say he was devastated would be an understatement. He stood in our living room with his shoulders hunched and his eyes on the floor. Tears streamed down his face, but his gaze… it was the gaze of an empty man. There was a hollowness to it that made me feel like his soul had floated away from him. It was bad enough to make me shudder. It was almost bad enough to keep me from walking out the door.
Almost.
I fled from the scene of the crime like the devil was hot on my heels. Maybe he was, and I was running away from facing the full gravity of what I had just done. Did I make the right decision? I’m pretty sure I did, but doubt still weighed on my mind as heavy as an anchor pulling a ship down to the sea floor. My mind was the ship, and I was rooted in place by one primary fear:
What if nobody ever loved me again?
Because he did do that. He loved me. He loved me so much, and I never questioned how much he did because he made sure to show me how much he loved me everyday.
And yet, I still ended things. Because while he loved me, his love was like a suffocating blanket over my body, and no matter how much I struggled I couldn’t find a way out from under it. I couldn’t handle it. I was too young and too free-spirited to be tied down just yet.
I spent the following months doing a lot of self-work. I rediscovered old hobbies and passions of mine that had withered away and died at some point in my relationship. I remembered what it was like to enjoy things again. I joined a gym to work on my physical well-being and started seeing a therapist to maintain my mental health.
I relayed my fear to her, telling her how paralyzingly afraid I was to never find someone who would care for me the way I wanted to be cared for. And she spent months convincing me that I would find love again, but only when I was ready to open my heart back up.
After a while, I was finally ready.
I met a guy at the gym. He was tall and handsome and a little awkward, but I liked that about him. We had a lot of similar interests, and I found myself really drawn to him.
I took things slow with my new beau. We had a long talking stage, way longer than most people, I think, would be okay with, but he was patient and kind and let me take things as slow as I wanted to. We hung out as friends before I allowed anything to truly spark between us, and when it did, the resulting flame burned low and slow. I let it burn that way until I was finally ready to call him my boyfriend.
About two months into us being an official couple, we met up after work at a restaurant I favored. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it had great cocktails and a dessert platter of fried ice cream that made me ascend to heaven with every bite.
He was nervous during our little after work date. He was fidgety–wringing out his hands or cracking his knuckles or tracing the swirly black tattoo on his right arm every few minutes. He watched me chow down on my fried ice cream with darting eyes, like he wanted to look at me but wasn’t sure how long it would be appropriate to.
When our meet up was over and he walked me out to my car, I finally figured out why he had been so anxious. Before I got into my car, he stroked the side of my face with his right hand and tucked a lock of hair behind my ear before telling me that he loved me for the first time. He pressed a brief kiss to my lips and then fled to his own vehicle. He was so cute and boyish about it all.
I watched him peel out of the parking lot, too dazed from his declaration to move quite yet.
Until I saw movement from the corner of my eye.
I whipped my head to the right and looked around the sea of parked cars to find the source. There were quite a few people in the restaurant and lingering around the parking lot, but the movement I saw stood out to me because I recognized the fluidity of it. I had spent several years of my life being around the source of it.
My eyes landed on a broad figure slinking away. I only had a good look of him for about a second before he disappeared around the corner. Yeah, I knew exactly who that was.
In my idiocy, I assumed that the likelihood of us running into each other at this restaurant was slim to none, as he only ever came here with me. I guess he liked it enough to keep coming back.
And now he knows I have a new boyfriend.
I let out a curse before getting into my car and getting out of there as fast as I possibly could. We weren’t together anymore, but that didn’t mean he had moved on. In fact, according to some of our mutual friends, he had very much not moved on.
“I’m going to wait for her,” he had told one of our friends. “And she will come back to me.”
The friend in question had been so spooked by his statement that she told me about it almost immediately after the interaction occurred.
“It gave me chills,” she had said, rubbing her arms up and down as if to ward off a shiver. “I’ve never seen him like that before.”
Truth be told it had sent chills through me as well.
I shoved it to the back of my mind, however, because as my therapist told me, his feelings were no longer my responsibility.
But the following week showed me that maybe they still were.
I had a bouquet of my favorite flowers–red roses–waiting on my work desk everyday. Initially, I thought it was from my boyfriend. Excitement had zinged through me until I had read the accompanying note.
Everyday a different variation of the same thing was written in my ex’s clumsy scrawl. He told me that he missed me and that he loved me. I picked up every bouquet he sent and threw them in the garbage.
By Friday, I had enough. I grabbed the bouquet with a little more force than necessary, not even bothering with the note.
I immediately dropped the bouquet on the floor of my office with a yelp, my blood spilling all over the delicate flowers. The red of my blood seemed to weave into the crimson petals. Sharp pinpricks of pain radiated all over my hands.
All of the other bouquets had been dethorned, I realized. All except for this one. It was with a start that I noticed that there wasn’t even a note attached to this one either.
Terror set in low in my gut, and the urge to vomit washed over me suddenly.
I ignored his gestures, and now he was angry.
He never got angry with me. Not once in our entire relationship. Not even when I deserved it. To be honest, I never thought him capable of it. He was always very calm, very stoic.
But everybody has a breaking point.
I left work early, citing an uneasy stomach as my illness. My boss, who knew I never asked for things like this, let me go with an inquisitive yet concerned furrow in her brow.
By the time I got home, I was almost hyperventilating. I was on the verge of tears. In my panic, I texted my boyfriend to come over. I didn’t want to call him because I didn’t want him to hear the tears in my voice. He was at work too, but at the urgency in my text, he promised to be over soon.
I let out a shaky breath and calmed down a little when he said he was on his way over.
I sat with my back to my front door, staring blankly into my apartment while I waited for him to knock on the door.
After a while, perhaps a little too long, he finally knocked on the door.
I got up off the floor so quickly I got dizzy. I fumbled with all the locks on my door until I could finally wrench the damn thing open.
“Thank God-“
I stopped.
There was no one in the hallway.
I looked both ways down the hall, seeing not a single soul. Every door was shut, and the elevator didn’t even look in use. I stepped into the hallway to investigate further, but my socked foot kicked something weighty.
The impact hurt my toes, but I was too engrossed in the box at my feet to care.
It was a standard brown shipping box. It was taped shut with packaging tape, and if it weren’t for the thorny rose taped to the top of the box, I wouldn’t have thought much of it. I order shit online all the time that I don’t always remember.
I knew it was from him.
I almost ignored it. I almost just shut the door and waited for my boyfriend to come over so we could open it together, but if I am anything, it’s curious. And that motherfucker knows it.
Gingerly, I picked up the box. It had some weight to it, and something kept sliding around inside of it. I quickly retreated back into my apartment and shut the door, putting all my locks back in place.
Carefully, I set it on the kitchen table before running into the kitchen and rummaging through my junk drawer for a box cutter. When I found it, I cautiously cut the tape keeping the rose to the box and removed it, avoiding the gigantic thorns that seemed to scream for me to touch them.
I ran my box cutter along the seam of the box, and pried it open.
I don’t know what I expected to be in the box, but it certainly wasn’t this.
Looking up at me was a human hand.
My box cutter clattered to the floor.
My voice was robbed from me. There wasn’t enough air in my lungs to scream. There weren’t enough synapses firing in my brain to even fully register what was sitting in front of me.
Mechanically, I reached into the box and picked up the hand. It was still warm to the touch. The bottom of the box was lined with a thick layer of gauze. Bloody gauze. Drenched gauze.
I stared at the hand. It was a right hand. The skin on it was on the paler side with black knuckle hairs dusting the fingers. It was severed at the wrist, and I saw a tiny little peaking of black ink right where the hand had been severed.
Every synapse in my brain fired at once, and I screamed. I screamed at the top of my lungs. I screamed until my throat felt raw and then I kept screaming.
I dropped the hand, and it hit the floor with a sickening squelch.
I scrambled away from it and grabbed the nearest thing I could. I puked into the flower vase sitting on my living room coffee table. I puked until there was nothing left in my stomach and then I kept puking. The acid burned my already raw throat.
My greatest fear came back, looming over me as I wretched into the vase. My therapist was wrong. My ex made sure of that.
No one would ever love me again.