I know, right? For once.
Actually, I’ve said this before (here we go) and I’ll probably say it again: I really feel that the English language lacks words to describe the love that can remain when a marriage (or similar) ends. The love that comes from a really deep understanding and experience of someone. The love that has your Ex knocking on the door with a body warmer, super-coincidentally on the very day you asked your friends via social media for the loan of a ski suit you could cycle to work in, because the weather has turned and you’re freezing. The love that means you argue because the other won’t take money from you, not because they won’t give it to you. The love that means you both know your Ex gets the fourth seat on the hypothetical life raft.
The love that has me crying in the kitchen writing this, while my Ex helps reinstate the roof-to-ground drainpipe that high winds knocked off my house this week. The love that had me searching for tickets for him to get away with the kids to his homeland next month. I was trying to keep our lives separate, but now and then there are ways we can help one another that it is easier to accept than deny.
It wrings my heart. Despite the many things that made our relationship a living hell, I miss so many of the things we shared: the plans, the going on holiday, the budgeting and then spending what we’d saved on things we enjoyed. The shared pleasure we took in our kids. Our shared outrage at the horrors going on in the world. I miss his strength, his determination, his courage, his presence. He’s a good man with a good heart.
We don’t talk of this stuff. He arrived with food for us all. I booked his holiday car rental, feeling awkward as we sat together at what was once our table. I didn’t eat the (possibly accidentally not a) veggie sausage roll he’d bought me until he’d left the room. I only wish I knew what he thinks about it all. But his actions tell me my feelings are mutual.
Of course this piece of current emotional leakage, that will have some of you raising your eyes to the ceiling, glosses over two critical words I used above. And I know where the ‘love’ we shared actually ended us.
But just now I am feeling, like some kind of rugby ball landing heavily in my stomach (like I’ve ever gone near a rugby ball!), the full force of what I had and what I miss. And, despite my best efforts to push it away, the full force of the guilt I still feel at leaving him, and the pain it has left behind, takes my breath away.
I’m not stuck. I’m ok. But I am still bound, to some extent, to someone I can’t help but still love. And maybe that is the word I seek.
