After

After he has left me at the airport, the messages start. 

It has suddenly hit him that I am leaving. After…He says he loves me very much, he misses me already. He realized how sad he was that I am actually gone. He can’t wait for me to get back. He was so busy planning our future together – our never ending love story – he forgot to think about the present, until now. After….

He calls because he needs to hear my voice. I am oddly quiet on the phone. I have been dealing with these feelings for weeks and trying to tell him how hard leaving him is. He only experiences it after. 

These messages are more of his mixed signals where he talks about how he is planning our life together and can’t wait for me to come back. He is just so sure that I am coming back to him. 

I wonder if he can hear my heartache. 

I tell him that this was the goodbye I was looking for and didn’t get. I tell him “it’s not you, it’s me”. I can’t explain to him now that it is too late, how much more I needed from him in those last couple of hours, in the last minutes. I know he loves me, but he does not understand what I need. 

I roam the airport and look for food. It is the only thing to soothe the pain now. I need to eat and eat and eat and purge. Going home is supposed to be happy, instead, I feel like I am bleeding. It is slow and agonizing. It is destroying me. 

Now I face 5 weeks where the starvation first started; where I learned to eat my feelings. The triggers have not changed in 20 years. I just chose to live far enough away from them. I take my anxiety over our relationship back with me to add to everything else. 

My mother tells me she has bought me rice cakes. She is enabling and she doesn’t even know it. 

Leaving

I am sitting in the airport waiting to go home. There is no ring on my finger. He said he would give me a reason to come back. I guess I thought that meant an engagement. I guess he didn’t think that. 

On Saturday he told me he planned a surprise day in the mountains for our last weekend. He told me he thought it would be good for us and would make me feel less anxious about our relationship as I left for home. My heart lurched. It skipped a beat. I knew that the proposal was coming…I just knew it! He had just waited until the very end. I put on a pretty dress and even painted my nails so they would be perfect for when he put a ring on. 

We drove to the mountains and every moment that was just so romantic for a “will you marry me?” came – and went. We picnicked by a lake and lay in the sun drinking wine. We walked hand in hand, we took a long drive on a deserted road and sat in the middle of nowhere staring at the Rockies and the lakes and the rivers. We laughed and sang and I just couldn’t wait for the moment to come. 

Of course it never came. 

I almost had to laugh at my naivety, my stupidity, my disappointment. 

Last night as we fell asleep he asked if I was ready to be his wife. I didn’t know what to say. The comments like that are the reason I believed he would ask me to marry him before I left. Now I’m just confused by them.

Up until today, I still believed that he would have proposed to me by now. Part of me wondered if he would buy a  plane ticket home and surprise me by just showing up. I will go home with that misplaced hope in my heart. He knows how desperately I wanted him to come back with me. He even hinted that he had thought about surprising me. 

Today he picked me up and took me to the airport. I envisioned making love and cuddling one last time before we left the house, but he wasn’t even remotely interested. He was only focused on getting to the airport. 

We checked in and sat in a restaurant where he told me he had looked at flights for him even a week ago. We didn’t look into each other’s eyes or say anything about how we were feeling. He was mostly agitated about time and needing to get back to work. He was waiting for me to cry, to fall apart and I was dying on the inside. It has been too emotionally overwhelming to find out that we are not where I thought we were and to leave without anything I had hoped for. 

He said he would see me in 5 weeks and then added “or maybe less” and I jumped thinking he meant he was coming home too and that was his way of telling me. “I meant that I would see you on Skype”, was his reply. 

My heart can’t take it anymore. 

At the airport, I waited for the epic goodbye. I had seen this moment a thousand times in my mind. Perhaps he would kiss me passionately and hold me tightly against him. Perhaps he would look into my eyes and say something profound about what I mean to him. Perhaps he would reassure me, put my anxieties to rest. Perhaps as I walked away I would hear his voice and when I turned around, he would be on one knee, smiling at me. 

It was, as usual, a complete let down. He was stressed about getting back to work. He put one arm around me as we waited in line and said he loved me and gave me a peck on the lips. It was a nothing moment. He said he had to run and walked away. Just like that. After everything…

I walked towards security and heard his voice. I turned in anticipation to see that last smile directed at me, to have him come back for one more kiss. Instead, he was talking to a girl he knew, her big, fake boobs in between us. He laughed and chatted and then walked away. His last goodbye was to her. His last look was at her. His last smile was for her. And then he was gone. 

Now here I am, with no reason to come back at all.