“I can’t do this anymore. We can’t be together,” he told me over dinner.
I didn’t ask him to change his mind. I accepted it.
The next day, he called to see how I was. The calls continued after that. At some point, I told him they were hurting me, that they were making it harder for me to accept what he had decided.
He didn’t stop.
I wasn’t trying to get him to take it back. I was only asking him not to make it harder for me to accept it.
Before I told him, he could have thought I liked hearing from him. After that, he didn’t have to guess. He knew.
That’s why every call after that hurt differently. It wasn’t just hard to hear from him anymore. Each call carried something I had already told him about myself, something that hadn’t changed what he did next.
I don’t expect someone to remember every word I say. But if I tell you that something you do hurts me, I want that sentence to stay somewhere.
Not in the conversation we finished that day.
In what you do next.
So that in the second before you do the same thing again, I exist in your decision.
Maybe you’ll get it wrong again. Maybe I will too. Sometimes we’ll have to tell each other, “This hurt me.”
For a long time, I thought if I’d accepted something, I had no right to bring it back. If I’d decided to leave it behind, it was supposed to stay there.
But some things come back when they happen again.
Then I’m not the one going back to the past.
The past comes back to me.
The first time, what you did hurts.
The second time, it also hurts that you already knew.
I didn’t tell you that without a reason.
I told you: this is where it hurts.
And I’d like not to have to start with that sentence again next time.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: BĀBI on Unsplash
