I Can’t Remember The Before

The void in my chest feels suddenly heavy as I stand staring down at dark water from my high-rise condo. It shouldn’t. I’ve lived with this emptiness for what seems like a lifetime. But a lifetime that began only a few years ago. A lifetime that began with a gut punch. A lifetime that began with the birth of my pain. What is now my second lifetime.

The before is faded now. A dim memory of what happiness was supposed to have felt like. Or maybe what someone told me happiness was supposed to feel like. I can no longer touch that former reality because it never was real, I imagine. It was just a trick my mind had played on me.

Having consciously chosen love after the worst, wanting to believe the timeworn adage that love conquers all, that love was worth fighting for, that love fixes all things, I stayed. I stayed with a man who didn’t deserve my love but I loved him nonetheless. Stayed with a man now trying in every way he can to show me that he was now worthy of love, now trying to live up to the promise of him that I had seen from the start, now trying desperately to show me he is forever changed.

At the time, I was so focused on the decision and the hurt and the how-could-he and the love that still raged inside me, I hadn’t anticipated that the blood flow to my heart might be constricted. We are years into our attempt at rekindling the embers of our relationship and love is clearly still present. But my heart is a dark void.

I see the new buds of attentiveness and respect that have sprouted in him. I hear the sorrow in his voice for the ugliness he inflicted on me and on himself. I feel his desire to live up to the image the mirror of my love reflected back at him.

But now, I am lost. Now, I stand facing my empty shell. Facing what I’ve become when I hold that mirror up to myself. Joy has leached out of me, slowly deflating me, leaving me flat and lifeless. Not because of what he hasn’t done. It likely began years before I learned the full truth. Began during the strain of the addictive years but I couldn’t see it then, my focus on him, my family, not on me.

Maybe if I could remember what happiness feels like, maybe if I could remember what it felt like not to live numb, I could chart a path where the burden of his weakness does not chain me to nothingness.

But I can’t remember the before, not all of it. Although, I can remember what it felt like to love him without the baggage we now carry. That is inscribed on my heart. Chiseled into my flesh. But I can’t remember what it felt like to be me. Me without the worry of how his alcoholism would destroy us. Me without the shackles of his secrets pulling me down.

If I can’t remember the me that existed before, can I find what is me now? One where the pain no longer casts a shadow over everything that I am?

Or am I destined to live empty? Destined to live with my amputated heart?