Memory Loss

Last night I discovered that Ivan left a comment on my blog a bit over a week ago asking if we could talk. I sent him an email and he replied.

When I saw the comment, my tears immediately rolled down my face uncontrollably. I haven’t thought of him for over a decade. My time in the City of Extremity is something I’d like to erase from my life. Because of what happened to me, and how my past supervisor shamed me even after I had already started a new life in the City of Power, I really wish I had never been there. It’s one year’s time that I can’t put on my resume, but when I mention that I’ve lived there, people would ask why and then I’d have to talk about my failures there, not just my professional failure but also my relationship failure; basically all my dreams had shattered in that place. If I tell people that I had a long term relationship in the City of Extremity and yet I never had sex with him, I’d have so much shame. Therefore it’s easier to just skip Ivan from my history and spare all my shame. 

When I talked to my therapists or ChatGPT about past relationships, I’ve never mentioned Ivan. I’ve completely forgotten about him because I spent years brainwashing myself that whatever we had was not real; it was all a lie. I moved on, from one man to another, because I didn’t want to compare any new man to him anymore. It would only cause more pain. When I revisited my old entries, I realized I spent at least three years grieving him.

What am I crying about today though? I think the strongest ache for me is that image of us at the airport, when we last saw each other, I was worried we’d never see each other again, and he said to me that he was pretty crazy so maybe he’d come visit me in the City of Rain. That made me believe that we’d see each other again and I wasn’t so scared of leaving that city and going home. I worked really hard with a lot of shame from my failure that year trying to pick up where I left off, but he was gone.

When I think of that conversation and his smile, the heartache is real, like physically. I guess I miss the younger me who still had so much hope and kept trying. At age almost 40, I don’t even know what hope is; I can’t even tell the difference between hope, expectation and fantasy. Because expectation and fantasy are unhealthy I’ve also given up on hope; otherwise these three things get blurred to easily and it only leaves me with despair and disillusionment. 

Angel’s parents landed in the City of Rain today and they came to our house for dinner. For the past six months, they have never asked me once how I was doing and when they saw me in person, they didn’t even give me a hug. All the work I poured into them in the past ten years meant nothing simply because I am divorcing their son. Their view of a human relationship is entirely based on legality. It only reaffirms my invisibility in his family—they have never seen me, or seen the effort I have made for Angel and his family, let alone the effort I’ve made for our kids, because they don’t even live in this country so they have zero understanding of the magnitude of the work I do for our boys, on top of a super demanding full time job that’s the same as their son’s.

See? Isn’t it better to have no hope in people? Just let them be who they are and walk away if you don’t like them.