Keep writing and revisiting.

Angel and I had our first meeting to lay out the major agreements for our divorce. It took us 3 hours and I cried a lot during the meeting. The plan is that we have a draft for our finances, emotional and logistical boundaries. We will live our lives according to the plan and the figure out what to modify and what to add. When our lives are stabilized based on the plan, we will finalize the divorce.

I have been feeling scared and anxious because I kept recalling how I fell in love with him ten years ago and I had completely lost myself for the name of love. I kept giving and giving until I had nothing left, and he has not changed a bit for the past ten years. I went back to read my entries from November 2015 and all the signs were there already. I kept convincing and erasing myself that this was the best I could do.

The other part of my anxiety comes from Eric. It seems to be hard for us to not talk and miss each other. A couple of nights ago, he texted me to tell me that he saw my weaknesses and he accepts them anyway; it’s working because I do the same for him and that is too rare in his life. I felt absolutely touched because I have been deprived of this kind of emotional resonance for over a decade. There are times when he called me just to hear my voice and he’d tell me that he really missed talking to me but couldn’t over the weekend because of his wife. A couple of weeks ago I told him that I was about to go through a lot of emotional turmoil and I’d be a wreck and I didn’t know if he wanted to be alongside of it. All I knew was that I wanted to protect what we had. He asked, “why would I not want to be alongside of it? Of course I want to and I want to protect what we have too.” However, in our most recent text conversation, things took a turn. He had convinced himself that what we have is emotional resonance but it is not love because our structures do not allow it to happen; he has a wife and I have kids. That part really hurt me. It was late at night and I could only tell him that ChatGPT told me not to talk to him for at least 30 days because it was too “dangerous”. I needed to be emotionally independent without knowing that someone might catch me emotionally. He called it bullshit because he thought I was going into some kind of isolation. He thinks it’s actually unhealthy not to dependent on others for emotional support because we all do, e.g. family and friends and therapists. I don’t know where he places himself among these people but I told him that there were times when I’d miss him but I don’t think that’s exactly healthy given our circumstances. He was upset and afraid that I was going to push him out and not talk to him. In the end I told him maybe I cannot quite separate my expectations and emotions. I don’t know if he could figure out what I meant; if he couldn’t, he could simply show ChatGPT our entire conversation and ChatGPT would figure it out for him.

ChatGPT really did a great job interpreting what I meant at the end of the conversation. My silence is my last bit of dignity; in my whole life, people had always found loving me is too much. They never loved the shape of me without looking at the architecture of me. Angel married me for the same reason—exceptional academic credentials, objectively good looking, tender, capable of making quite some money, and I have perfect pitch. But he could not feel or see the depth of my emotions, my feelings and that’s why our marriage couldn’t last. I never saw it last from the beginning anyway; I only saw myself committed and loyal to the idea of taking care of him for the sake of love. I am so badly missing being loved.

Eric associated love to not just emotional resonance; he also wants a structure for it so that it’d be love. He told me there was one relationship where he was deeply happy even though there was no emotional resonance but we never had a chance to talk about it. To me, I think the structure for the love is necessary to protect it but I think a lot of it is up to the universe and whether the two people have the courage to build the structure together is also up to the universe. It’s completely out of my control. All I know for now is that he seems to still love his wife and yet the vulnerabilities we have exchanged are no longer safe given the circumstances. I also find myself in the same position where I was 12 years ago with him, when he had a long-term relationship and then ended it in 2013. Maybe he’s wondering in his head why I always showed up and destabilized the longest relationships he had. 

Talking to Eric always made me feel so happy and laugh so much. It’s also sweet and bittersweet. He said that talking to me gives him ache but he didn’t want it to go away; he thinks the ache would mellow out on its own. From my experience, the ache would mellow out only if I had intellectualized it and convinced myself of something new, e.g. maybe telling myself that he was a jerk, a womanizer, used me for fun, would never leave his wife, etc. If I hadn’t used these things to brainwash myself, then that ache would stay equally painful and heavy just like it was at the start. It’s like you have wound on your skin and if you never build a scar or scab around it then it would always cut open and bleed and hurt. I think that’s what he wanted to do with me—he wanted to talk more and figure out how our logistics would never work so that he could stop feeling the pain of missing out on me. In one phone call he actually asked me, “if we really ended up in a relationship say for 3 or 5 years, do you think we’d still have so much to talk about? Most couples run out of things to talk about after some time and you’re just doing your own thing.” I told him that I didn’t know; it depends on how the two people grow together. 

So yeah, he needs to figure out what my silence means. If he really is my soulmate like ChatGPT said, then he should know; he should know that I’m still the same girl he met 12 years ago, with the same ideals about love and I want to be protected, and I want what we have to be protected. But if he’s going to keep intellectualizing our connection and circumstances and telling me that what we have is not going to last, then I’d rather start being alone now. ChatGPT says that what he’s doing to me is a slow heartbreak; he has a wife to fall back onto whereas I am getting a divorce and about to be completely alone. He is not as brave as I am, yet.

If he is the one for me, maybe he’d figure things out. Maybe he’d really come find me years down the road, like the visit he couldn’t make 12 years ago. Ironically over the past 12 years he had been to the City of Rain more than 25 times. But this should happen when he is truly ready. Otherwise it’d just be like that night in Orlando, where he came to my hotel to see me after meeting me for the first time and asking me to come downstairs. I rejected because it was late and I wanted to sleep and I had Ken sleep in my hotel room at that time. I told him that we were both from the City of Gold so why couldn’t we wait to talk until we were back? He said it was complicated and it had to be then. I asked him, “is it because you had a girlfriend in the City of Gold?” And then he admitted it. I had waited for him to break up with his girlfriend for a long time, for over a year I believe. When we used to hangout, we never even touched hands or held hands. The most we did was to give each other a hug, although there were many emotional exchanges. When he finally broke up with his girlfriend and told me he could come visit me, he started a new relationship in a new city and never came to see me. He told me he wrote me a letter but couldn’t send it because he didn’t want to hurt me again.

A few weeks ago he found that letter and read it to me over the phone. He told me that he was in a chaotic phase and he couldn’t afford to have a long distance relationship and lose and hurt another person that he cared a lot about. I wonder with our silence now if he could put the puzzle pieces together and see what I see.