Life Began The Day My Heart Broke

I was 34, ready for a lifetime partner and family. I have found the person to be with for the rest of my life.

I wrote endlessly about that love and I was damn proud of it. He was like no one I have ever met.

I was going to get married in a few months’ time, move in with him, build a family, and adopt our dog from the shelter. The future looked bright.

I was in disbelief that this feeling, this kind of existence, existed. I felt extremely lucky.

Two and a half years later, I experienced the shift. From the joy and wonder of finding a new love to the realization that…

…love is not enough.

The perfect beginning

Remember when you started chatting with someone that you so badly wanted to meet because you had the sweetest conversation?

He looked great, had good values and seemed like he’d be a great father to your kids. There was a connection between you two.

The first and second dates were the best dates ever. There was nothing like it. He was like no one you ever met before. You kept seeing each other, then, later, you have the talk.

It happens when two dating people are ready to put a label — or not — on who they are to each other. A label could be something that says, “We really like each other a lot. Let’s stay right here,” or “Let’s make this official.” or “I really like you but I am not ready to commit.”

My relationship was like that but on a grander scale.

Both of our families were supportive of us. We traveled together, made great memories by the sea, in airports, and in our homes. But we were apart 90% of the time.

The long distance

Then the pandemic came, I got very sick, and he had personal issues to deal with. Not being with each other was already a burden, but not knowing when we will see each other again made that burden heavier.

Our excess pieces of baggage crept up and we couldn’t stop them from destroying what was left of our relationship. I became angry and resentful. Why isn’t our relationship working the way I want it to? How did we get here? How can other LDR couples last for years and here we are, two years in, but we keep stumbling?

I cried from our fights, loneliness, and isolation.

Until I found out he had met someone at a wedding party. A shiny, new object has arrived. I was going to be displaced.

Months before that, in my journal, I wrote, “Something doesn’t feel right anymore.”

Our lines in the shift were, “This is not working for us anymore.” In the talk, we admitted, “We need to separate.”

The support system

I let my mother hold me while I cried, and she absorbed all of my pain for the two of us. Weakness and tightness grabbed every part of my body — my chest, my appetite, my zest for life.

The energy to push through diminished, and I didn’t know what to do. I was 36 years old, single, and afraid of never finding love again.

Now, years have passed. The tears have stopped coming but the memories still visit once in a while.

The good, the bad — they come unnoticed until they fill my thoughts, to which I respond with Eckhart Tolle’s biggest contribution to the human race — the message of ‘The Now’.

Being present

Now is all we have and now is all there will ever be. The past is a memory. The future is a thought. Yesterday is gone.

I had to let go of my old identity and attachments. The future that I longed for was never going to come.

Now is all we have. To tune in to the present, we have to be aware. To look at what surrounds us, what’s in us, instead of letting our minds wander to what’s behind and ahead. This is the only thing we can believe in.

Losing the love of my life had taken me back to where I truly belong — here and now.

Odyssa is the author of Like A New Sun Rising: A Collection of Poems on Love and From Where I Stand: A Collection of Poems on Travel.

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