© T.H. Warrior – Tender Hearted Warriors
– S.S.P. & E.L.C.
April 16th, 27 degrees; The sun, the beach, the birds, grandma’s balcony. What more could a girl want?
My grandmother had this chair on her balcony. We called it the “Terminator”. The moment our bottoms reached that chair after that 2-portion- size of a meal she’d feed us, it was over. We would be temporarily dead and gone into the fairyland of happiness and peace and naps for at least 2 hours.
The sun was touching my soul, and the wind was whispering into my ear as I found myself in this gray state of being neither asleep nor up. It was as if I was dreaming but simultaneously controlling my dream too.
I could hear John saying those last words ever exchanged between us the last time I saw him.
…
_ “It is what it is: I’ve been unhappy for almost six months. Your behavior has been anything but perfect. I can’t stand us anymore. I want out. It’s a good thing we’re not married or any-thing. The way is open and so is the door. We can cut things clean, fast, and easy.
Is there anything you’d like to say?”
Juggling between keeping my head high and choking my tears back, I somehow found my voice back and said:
_” There are things that one should do, but technicalities get in the way. And then there are things that one should never do but technically could, and you just did it simply because you could. I had a lot to say. But you burned bridges just now. I suddenly lost the will to ever talk to you ever again.”.
He said he would call me two days after I had calmed down to discuss it.
He did call. His friends called. Others reached out.
That moment when you are angry, sad, emotional, and could really use a shoulder and pair of ears to cry and throw up your sorrow on, and you still don’t and won’t talk about your pain with anyone, that’s when you’ve literally reached your saturation point.
…
My pain wasn’t coming from my getting dumped over a 2-minute conversation. It came from many places, but losing my boyfriend wasn’t one of them.
I had been unhappy for a long time. I was feeling used and confused at the same time.
Too many big and bigger things were bothering me for far too long. As a woman born and raised in a conservative family, I was always taught to be the bigger person and do the right thing.
A good woman turns a blind eye, keeps her mouth shut, supports, is loyal, forgives, and for-gets.
A good woman sacrifices.
A good woman gives.
A good woman stays.
Things were piling up so much that all the molehills had already turned into mountains.
I was feeling like a little pea shell stuck in the tube of a pressure cooker, gathering dust, about to burst out.
…
The funny thing is that most men don’t realize when exactly they fall out of love with their women.
We, au contraire, can tell you the second it happens; we just give it more and more and more time.
The weird thing is that to this day, I still remember the warmth I felt in my heart when we started dating; I was psyched, on cloud nine.
The sad thing is that I also remember how it wasn’t long after that when I started feeling like that girl, who’d walk into the bar, win the bet with her homegirls, get the hottest guy but lit-erally wouldn’t even look at him, simply because he was too easy.
For the longest time in our relationship, I felt like the weirdo, the outsider who constantly needed to inform herself about the “rules.”
I was pretending to be someone I wasn’t; just to fit in.
I started to believe that if I kept my mouth shut about many things that were bothering me, I would start adapting to them, and with time I wouldn’t even notice that they were there.
On that path, I forgot who I was, what I was about, what I believed in, what was wrong and what was not. What felt good and what did not.
…
I guess the hardest part about having gotten dumped so brutally fast in the name of technical-ity was that I felt like I had lost a part of me that I could never have back: my innocence. My innocently and naively believing in the good of others, in the right and wrongs that I had established for myself, almost like a self-built religion.
After that day, the day that I felt I had been badly wronged, I questioned every right and wrong. I lost trust and belief in every single inch of my soul. I questioned all the statements that could be taken as insults; all the actions that could be interpreted as assaults. Maybe I wasn’t wronged after all. That was a way to think about it! It was sedating the pain, some-how.
Who had died and made us the king of rights and wrongs and apologies?
It was as if I had become yet another person with no rules, period!
I’d started thinking that believing in right and wrong was like trying to find the perfect pizza topping. Some people swear by pineapple, while others think it’s sacrilege. And let’s not even get started on the pineapple-on-pizza haters!
I was thinking how our souls could have their own idea of what’s wrong, but with over seven billion people on earth, it was impossible to know who’d got the secret sauce. Religions had their own strict rules, but sometimes it constantly felt like we were just arguing about top-pings again.
So, I thought to myself that I could take a deep breath, fuck it off, enjoy a new slice of pizza (with whatever hell of the topping I damn well pleased!), and stop trying to force my version of “right” on this wrong and unfair world. After all, life was too short to argue about pizza! I needed truce.
Defining right and wrong is like trying to win an argument on the internet – impossible! Hu-mans have been fighting for thousands of years over what they think is right, but let’s be real: we’re all just acting on our own level of consciousness.
Blaming others for being wrong and praising ourselves for being right, only creates separa-tions and never solves anything. So why not give anyone the benefit of the doubt and assume they’re doing their best with what they’ve got? These thoughts calmed me down for a good couple of months.
I got a new certificate, got another job, a haircut.
Months had passed. The lawless land worked.
I was happy again.
…
Years passed.
…
I found myself in a DeJa’Vu.
I had been dating Andy for four years that February. I truly loved him, but he was a handful. Let’s just say he was a very passionate person who was comfortable enough around me to be himself. I always took that as a compliment. His personality would turn inside out once he got home and changed out of the suit he’d been wearing for 15 hours. He didn’t have to play “the role” anymore. He could take off “the mask .”He wasn’t at work- He was home where he could be unapologetically himself. Honest, authentic, loud, real.
One thing that everyone in my life loved about me was my peaceful smile. No matter how difficult things were, I always somehow managed to tuck them under the rug and keep my mood positive at all times. Even my naggings and critics were seasoned perfectly: salty but with a sweet aftertaste.
This made things easier for people around me but not for me. Life would get loud at times. Too loud. No one ever saw me angry. No one ever heard me complain. No one ever felt that I, too, could feel things. And when the right number of people at the right time tickled me just a bit more than enough, I reached the saturation moment, and I exploded. That was when the water was so much above my head, and I was swimming up for my life, and I barely made it to the surface just in time; that’s when I literally and figuratively burst. That’s when I had “the fight” with Andy.
I had wronged him. It was bad.
Adults don’t break up over a fight. When they do, the fight usually acts as an accelerator or a trigger, not a reason. However, there are moments in which your words shoot to kill. There is no going back. The page is turned. The bridge is burned. Those kinds of arguments could reset and burn your beautiful legacy.
…
We both slept over it. In separate beds, of course.
…
I was getting ready for the biggest apology of my life:
I drank 1.5 liters of wine, cried my soul out, was up until 6 am, and was about to pitch my apology by 9:30. Little did I know that apology could never be accepted. Because the first person who should’ve accepted it was me. How could I ask for someone else’s forgiveness when I hadn’t even forgiven myself yet? Why would someone believe I was sorry for the wrong I’d done when even I hadn’t believed it yet?
Wait… did I not believe the apology? Or did I not believe that I had done something wrong?
It took me a whole summer to realize the answer to that question. That summer, when we were on a break.
For that, I first learned how to love myself again. I let go of my dark clouds and took a good look at myself in the mirror. Before that, all I could see was a pair of eyes filled with despair and regrets. Then one morning, I woke up, and I not only saw myself but looked at myself. I could finally see what others saw. I was something. Wow, I’m smart, beautiful, funny… Wait… I am there again.
Suddenly I found myself on the very day, and at that very place, In our apartment, in the middle of the explosion with the grenade in my hand and RPG pill in my mouth. It was as if I was looking at myself from the beyond. To my surprise, I didn’t want to yell at myself back then, didn’t want to talk myself out of talking to him that way, didn’t want to do anything but hug myself. I did need a hug that day. And that was when I realized:
The way I had talked was the best way I could’ve talked, The best way I would’ve. There was no right and wrong. There was just a comparison of the alternatives and synonyms and nothing more.
Don’t get me wrong now. Life is not all about us alone. Throughout our life spans, we come across others. People come and go. Of course, it is not our responsibility to protect them from getting hurt, but we cannot harm others, trying not to get hurt ourselves.
We apologize because of two reasons:
The first and most common one is that we want and need to maintain our relationship with the one we wronged. The second reason is that we want to liberate our consciousness. Bot-tom line: It’s not about them. It’s about us- Knowing this will help us throughout the apolo-gy.
To most people, an apology is the word: „sorry.“ Sometimes a gift or a gesture.
To a few, an apology is a journey.
I remember the first day at kindergarten, Ms. Patterson gave us this coloring book and asked us to color it. I asked what color. She said: “It doesn’t matter, sweetheart, as long as you stay in between the lines. Just be mindful. You don’t wanna be too sharp or too pale. It’s all about balance.”
I thought to myself my apology should be coloring that book in between the lines and bal-anced.
I had to be careful not to overdo it. Otherwise, I could damage my self-esteem.
I couldn’t be too stingy about it, either. I had to let my guard down so that Andy could too.
I imagined he, just like most people needed this simple single word: „Sorry. “ It would be either my ticket in or out. Regardless, I thought he probably needed to hear it, so I had to say it.
Then I finally had to forgive myself. In order to understand myself, I first needed to forgive myself. I could never analyze my behavior unless I understood it.
It had been three months of analyzing. Probably even over-analyzing. So, I asked myself: “Will I hurt him again?”
See, there’s one thing when a financial accountant over-or under books provisions in one year up to 2%. But it is another thing when they commit tax fraud.
Now imagine this accountant being confronted:
They cannot promise not to ever make a mistake again. Especially in financial accounting, that is a bit of an unrealistic overpromise. But can someone who once stole, to begin with, simply promise that they will never steal again?
People won’t change their behavior unless there’s a price to pay.
I had paid the price. I was missing him. I loved him. I asked myself: „Do I deserve his for-giveness, or must I pay the price of losing him for good?“
The good thing was that I knew my audience. I knew Andy very well. After that fight, best I could do was to walk. The best apology I could offer him was to give him enough liberty to resent me, forgive me, forget me, and do whatever the hell he wanted to do with me. If I had pushed myself on him after I knew I had wronged him, I would’ve only added fuel to the fire. I could do nothing but walk- I let the time do its magic. I focused on myself. Learned how to love myself. Healed my own broken bones.
Now, why did I emphasize the word „him“?
There is no right and wrong except for our own.
He had opened the door of his heart and soul, let me in, showed me all of his true self and his own rights and wrongs, and I betrayed his trust with my pushed-under-the-rug- emotions and dishonest self until I burst. Yes. I absolutely owed him an apology.
…
Three months passed.
I got rid of the lawless land. I went back and apologized.
Was I sure that I was never going to hurt him again? No.
But I did get rid of that dirty filthy rug.
Feelings were on the table.
Emotions were discussed.
We turned a new page.
Started a new chapter.
I finally let go.
He did too.
…
_Andy:” You’ve been sleeping out here for hours! Your grandma’s made tea. Come inside; it’s getting chilly!”.
I got up thinking of that greyish dreamlike nightmare. Why, after all these years, I was think-ing of that traumatizing breakup?
And then it hit me just like that knife-cutting wind that was blowing my hair:
I never got my apology. That person had made me question my entire being. Toss all my rules aside just to sedate the pain I was feeling. And I never got anything. I’d been wronged even though I’d done nothing wrong. It wasn’t fair.
Even after all these years of me brewing and stewing my feelings, every now and then, they’d come to the surface and punch me in the gut just like the first time.
On that beautiful day, on my grandma’s balcony, I promised myself never to let it bother me again.
When something’s toxic, and it’s always been that way and adds nothing to you but pain and misery, you don’t need to forgive or forget. You just simply become indifferent. And you move on.
That day we had tea with my grandma. She loved Andy. And he her.
We played charades and had my grandmas’ famous chicken and fries.
…
I needed no apology.
I needed no truce.
I was at peace.
And that was my lifetime god damn absolute truth.