In Her Eyes, I Recall the Existential Terror of a Lost Child or a Frightened Animal
It’s been a year since we broke up. Since I moved out. Since we last spoke. Within that year I’ve flourished and thrived in every aspect of my life — peak physical condition, professional success, and more profound interpersonal relationships. And yet there are moments throughout the day that my mind escapes my stronghold and thinks of her with great nostalgic angst.
The tragedy of how a main character in the unfolding story — the narrative — of your life, fades out, “exits…stage left” to become nothing but a ghost of a memory.
“How could I have abandoned her like that?” “Why couldn’t I have been centered enough, mature enough to carry both our weights in life?” “Does she know that I’ll always be there for her, even though I was the one who broke it off?”
These are the questions that haunt me, that come out to play during moments of silence.
She is a couple of years older than I am and when we met, she had two more years of undergrad left. She and her brother were raised by a single mother who suffered from PTSD, which made for an authoritative and abusive mother-daughter relationship. Her dad was never really in the picture, he failed to provide her with the emotional infrastructure every young girl needs from her father during early development. She escaped her mother’s intolerable nest in her early twenties to fend for herself while carrying the luggage of anxiety and bipolar disorder (manic depression).
She carried herself confidently on the outside, but in the depth of her eyes, you could see the existential terror of a lost child or a frightened animal.
I was in my final year of undergrad, on the cusp of graduating. I was overwhelmed with the anxiety and dread of the “chaotic possibilities that existed out there in the real world” which everyone feels when they’re about to graduate — more generally, the dread and anxiety a human being feels when a structure of life that they’ve grown accustomed to and by which they’ve defined their reality gets rattled by the looming chaos of sudden change. Think Morgan Freeman at the end of Shawshank redemption.
At that point, I had never been in a serious relationship and was an illiterate in all aspects of mental health.
That was the context in which we started a serious relationship. She — subconsciously searching for the existential security of a father figure. Me — dreadful of the looming chaos of life beyond graduation, inexperienced in serious relationships, and an illiterate in all aspects of mental health (that last point certainly changed over the course of our two-year relationship as I read voraciously to fill the gap and learn how to deal with her anxiety and depression).
I was determined to make it work, make everything work! — our relationship, my personal and professional goals, and our happiness. But the map is not the destination — and reality is not as I’ve imagined it to be.
Tragically — and I mean that word with emotional profundity — my shoulders were not broad enough to bear the burdens of those life circumstances at that stage of my development, growth, and maturity.
Familiarity breeds indifference and an unwillingness to sacrifice and to want to “make the relationship work”. My ambitions were too great and demanded my full focus, time, and energy. So, I decided to end it…
The decision made me sick to my stomach — I was also raised by a single mom, an only child, and dad was never in the picture. I was her father figure and so I felt that she was being abandoned on two levels — one by her boyfriend and the other by her source of fatherly security…it still makes me queasy.
Agape is the ancient Greek word for “the highest form of love and charity”. It embraces a universal, unconditional love that transcends and persists regardless of circumstance. It goes beyond just the emotions to the extent of seeking the best for others. That’s what I feel for her. Are my feelings genuine? Or borne out of some form of fatherly guilt?
This is the first time that I’ve written down emotions on paper to search for meaning and resolve. I tell myself that it’s worth sharing, if it can at least, engender a sense of companionship in someone who might’ve had similar experiences and think that they’re alone.
Your companion in the search,
Sam
