Skips Beats Races

I must be honest. I am procrastinating right now. However, I feel entitled to procrastinate. You see, on Tuesday night, my girlfriend, who I came to love and let in to the depths of my heart over the past several months, broke my heart. That thing that I follow, that skips and beats and races. It is broken.

I’ve known heartache, but I’ve never been dumped.

More importantly, the circumstances of this experience are frustrating. This is not the only unfortunate thing going on in my life right now. I am unemployed and desperately trying to understand what I want to be doing. But, now I am also trying to figure out if I have lost myself somewhere in all of this difficulty.

Did I lose my heart during the same period that I was giving it away? Two separate and unrelated events—did I forget who I am and what I stand for and what I’m doing, and during the same period of time fall in love with someone so much that I never noticed what was missing. It’s all very confusing and, as usual, I don’t know the answer. But perhaps it is true. The most sad thing of it all, is that by losing myself, I lost the girl I love. My challenges put too much stress on her, and it was too hard for her to watch the man she cares about fight with so much. She had her own pressures, her own stress. But, when she was with me, the sight of my struggle overwhelmed her and made her anxious to the point where she couldn’t do her own work, or handle her own pressures and stress. So, she needed to take space. And, when she took space, she found that the freedom relieved her of my pressures. She found that being in a relationship with me was too much for her to handle right now. And, that is fair. But it is also devastating.

Now, I am left to pick up the pieces on my own. To figure out where I lost myself, and how to find my way back. On my own. Alone. With no love to keep my heart beating, racing, or skipping.