So what made me finally abandon ship after all the bullshit I took from BP? Common sense making a comeback. She went on a work trip for a few weeks and, although we weren't in the best place when she left, we were managing. I rarely heard more than a few texts from her on the days when she worked so I didn't expect much. I got nothing. We went about three days with absolutely no contact, in spite of the fact that I texted every one of those days. I was annoyed, but I chalked it up to being busy and figured we'd catch up when she got home in a few days time. Nope. Her first day home, she slept, which was the norm since she ALWAYS worked herself sick. The next day, I said I'd like to catch up and was available to do so all day and/or evening and she didn't even respond. When she finally did, it was only to tell me she was going out with a girlfriend and couldn't talk. The next week and a half brought more of the same, complete and total avoidance of me. I got upset but that produced no reaction from her so I went for vulnerability, telling her that we were teetering on the edge of a cliff at the moment and if she didn't tune back into us very soon, we were going over the edge. The responses to my vulnerable comments were mean and so incredibly cold; "That's your problem", "I'm a dinner, I can't deal with this right now". Then, out of nowhere, she begins texting me about how she's "not okay", but doesn't elaborate (I'm sure she was drunk at the time). A few more days of this went by before we talked briefly on a Saturday and made plans to hash things out on Wednesday. I had to work long hours the rest of the week so that was really my only day to deal with everything between us. On Sunday night at almost one in the morning she texts me that she has to go to L.A. for three days and will "probably" be back on Thursday. Just. Like. That. It was amazing to me how much she bitched about "disrespect" and accused me of disrespecting her over the tiniest things, yet she had absolutely no concept of it when it came to her disrespecting me. Once again, I was the lowest man on the totem pole and she expected me to just take it or leave it. That's when I really started to open my eyes and distance myself from everything. In the past, if I ever tried to end it, she would turn on the crocodile tears and claim she couldn't live without me and would never be with anyone else the rest of her life. For awhile, I believed it and it was enough to make me stay. But not anymore. I asked her how her life honestly changes if I make my exit, since she was barely speaking to me anymore as it was. She had no answer.
We sputtered on in limbo for awhile longer with nearly every one of our interactions resulting in a fight of some sort. At that time, I had so much anger and hostility towards her for having abandoned me the way she did and for continuing to take me for granted. I voiced all of that on a daily basis since we STILL had not spoken about anything. She'd admitted to pulling away and taking me for granted but never apologized for it. Apologies were never her strong suit. They always came with a "but..." attached. I was also angry that it took her nearly two weeks to admit she had intentionally pulled away during her trip. She KNEW what she was doing, I knew what she was doing and asked as much, yet she still ignored me and the question and continued stringing me along. If she'd just been honest, I would've moved on then and there. But she knew as much, which is why she handled things the way she did. She went away again, this time on a week-long trip with her mom and non-problem child brother. We were barely speaking but she texted me everyday to shoot the breeze. I sent curt texts back because you don't get to just check out of someone's life whenever you feel like it and then come back in to hear the good things, dealing with none of the negative. She said dealing with her mom for a week gave her a glimpse into what I must deal with when we fight and that she didn't want to be that way anymore. She'd made this speech a week prior, but nothing had changed so I didn't expect much this time either. Good thing too, cuz I still got nothing. Her turnaround lasted for two whole days before she got annoyed that I wasn't letting all my walls down immediately and she abandoned ship, again.
The next month consisted of more grueling exchanges, none of them happy or even close to being "okay". Her favorite thing to tell me now was that she was "busy" and couldn't talk/text/hang for that reason. Yet still wanted me to believe I was first on her list. Instead of talking everyday or every few days when we couldn't hang, we started talking, maybe, once a week. We texted sparingly, none of it about our many, many issues. It was stupid. I'd let go of my anger because there was no use in holding onto it, no use in expecting apologies. I suspected she was done with this but was keeping me on the line so that she didn't have to think of me moving on. Months of barely any contact and non-sincere apologies had taken their toll on me and I was beginning not to care about her anymore. The pattern became her telling me she wanted to try and fix things, me believing her, and her proceeding to ignore me again. I got tired of having my calls ignored so I called her. No answer. She claimed she'd been on the subway. We texted some more before I called again, about an hour later. No answer. This time, she claimed she'd been getting ready for bed. Never did she attempt to return any of my calls. Finally, she answered one of them and was on the warpath from the start. I barely said five words in the ten minutes we were on the phone. It was in that last minute that I attempted to say something in response to her rant and I got two words out before she said, "Just shut the fuck up". No way. I'd taken a lot of shit from her but I wasn't taking anymore. NO ONE ever says that to me. I said, "Fuck you" and hung up, knowing that that was it for me. I was done. She had pushed me so fucking far over the edge that I didn't know if I'd ever be able to climb back up. After I hung up the phone, I set filters on my email so I would not get her messages and I turned off alerts for her texts on my phone, then I went to bed. I'd done all of this before during past fights, but always relented when she dished out an apology the next day. But not this time. The next morning I saw she'd texted after I hung up to say she was tired and we shouldn't have spoken. That's it. That's all you got? Not good enough at all. I said very little over text, telling her she could call me at a specific time to talk. Many, many, many times she'd told me we'd talk at whatever time and then proceeded to miss that time and go out on the town later. I expected her to do the same here, say she couldn't talk and leave things in limbo. To my surprise, she did call. I was straight with her, that this had to be done because there was no good left. I'd tried EVERYTHING to right the ship, but nothing worked and she'd showed little interest in grabbing a sail herself. She was stoic for the first half of the call. Then she realized I was serious and began the waterworks. She never tried to change my mind, only reiterated the "I don't know how to live, won't be with anyone else ever" bullshit, like a kid holding their breath until you give them what they want. Then she asked me how *I* could just shut off emotions and be so stoic and it took all I had not to laugh out loud. You've done this shit to me for MONTHS and now you're on me about that? She also tried to blame the night before on me. I said I couldn't be with someone who could tell me to shut the fuck up in such a cavalier manner and her response was, "Well you told me, "fuck you". She was always focused on what was done to HER, regardless of how it all came about. She was very childlike in that way. I eventually had to go and she tells me that if I ever change my mind, I can give her a call. I said I wouldn't, that once we hung up, we would be out of each other's lives for good. This was just too toxic to ever revisit again. We hung up and I thought that was it.
But, of course, it wasn't it. Never is "it" with her. Apparently she'd sent me an email not long after we hung up but I didn't see it until almost a week later because of my email filters. All it said was she "couldn't move". A few hours after we hung up she texted me something that looked to be a misfire, which she confirmed in a follow-up text. Like an idiot, I responded with "No worries." and that was all she needed to get her foot back in the door. I knew the misfire wasn't actually a misfire, she deliberately sent it to the wrong person looking for a reaction. And I bit. She said she was on the couch and didn't want to do anything, had canceled on going to a friend's birthday dinner because she was "so sad". I only half bought it but found it hilarious that she could never make five minutes for me when we were together, but could clear her schedule whenever we broke up. We started talking and it was a steady convo for about an hour, then I didn't hear from her again until around 9 when she said she was a bar with her friends. I asked what happened to be so depressed that she couldn't move and she said that she HAD to go out to the after dinner party since she'd canceled on dinner. Color me stupid. I should've known that's what would happen. She would've gone even if it had been the end of us, I'd bet money on that. I never understood how her mind worked. It was like feast or famine, everything was either all good in her head, or it was all bad and there was never any middle. She could snap from being devastated to being a-ok in no time flat. It was bizarre. It was almost borderline sociopathic the way she compartmentalized everything. Towards the end of our relationship, I wondered if she wasn't a touch bi-polar. I firmly believe her mother and brother are, to varying degrees, so it wouldn't have been surprising if she was too. I've seen that disorder in close friends, I know how it operates and I recognized the symptoms in all three of them. I was even more done now than I had been before. Going from not being able to move, to a fun night on the town within a few hours is not normal. It was also odd given that when her previous boyfriend had sent her an email ending whatever relation/friendship they had left, she genuinely was depressed for almost a day and a half. That told me plenty.
The next day she began texting me as if they day before had never even happened. It was so ridiculous that I finally had to ask what the hell we were even doing. As far as I was concerned, we'd ended that day and had no more ties. She claimed to be "in denial" over the break-up and again said she wanted to work things out. That night, I was honest with her in saying I didn't think things could be worked out and that we were just back into the same limbo we'd spent months in. She passed out mid-convo and the next day I didn't hear from her, so I shot off a few angry texts. She barked back for awhile and then said she "had to go" because it was yet another friend's party. I said she ALWAYS had somewhere better to be and left it at that. The next day, still no word. Later that night she texted, again as if all was hunky dory, and I told her I was going out in the hopes that it would slam home what exactly was going on with us now. Of course, it didn't. The following day was more of the same, she never contacted me so I contacted her and she said she was still at some friend's thing (three days later). The day after was where it all officially came tumbling down. I tried to get a hold of her, told her we needed actual resolution because the limbo place was awful for me. She told me how *I* felt, saying she was sure I wasn't all that torn up about it because I hadn't been reaching out to her everyday. I tried calling, she ignored me and went to bed. Then she texted in the morning to refute everything I'd said the night before and all I could muster was an, "I don't care". And that was it. Never contacted her again, never heard from her again.
My friends have a running joke about how I'm unable to keep my romantic relationships together. I think it's hilarious, and it's been true on more than a few occasions, but my time with BP taught me that I am not as terrible at them as I once thought. Amazing how that works, isn't it? I've said before that I don't believe just because a relationship ends, it can automatically be chalked up as a failure. Maybe it's because few of my romantic relationships have been lasting, but I think the true measure of whether or not something was successful is if you learned from it. If you learned something about yourself, about life or about relationships in general, than there was a reason you went through it and it wasn't a complete waste of time. And in that sense, I understand why I had to go through the BP debacle. It taught me that I am a better person than I thought I was. It showed me what life is like for those who have far more problems than I could ever comprehend. BP was a waste. Of my time, of my tears, of my emotions, of my energy. I'm not sure she was ever capable of a normal, loving and stable relationship because dysfunction was all she'd ever known. She'd never been in a relationship that lasted longer than a year or so, everything in her past was on and off. So were we, in a sense. I know I gave my all but the problem was I didn't have much to work with, and I couldn't do it alone. And I'm left thinking it must be such a...hollow existence to be a mean spirited person. To always be so defensive about everything, and often needlessly so. I wrote once of how she seemed to hold the trigger to my emotions, but how I didn't believe she knew that, or intentionally hit that trigger. But now I know I was wrong. She knew and she never showed any restraint when things got nasty. It was always attack, attack, attack. I remember how on at least three separate occasions, she was berating me or yelling at me and I just lost it. I went into tears and said, "stop". She never did. She kept berating and berating and even when I fucking begged her to stop yelling at me, she did not. And each of those times it made me sick to think how somebody I trusted, somebody I loved, could be so awful as to not relent even once they had me as low as I could go. I mean, who does that? I cannot even fathom continuing to scream at someone once they were crying. That's emotional abuse. And I took it. Because I believed she loved me as much as she said she did. Instead, it turned out to be a case of Jekyll and Hyde, and Hyde came back to stay after that last work trip. She told me she couldn't live with my judgments and my getting upset with her but doesn't seem to grasp that she did the same thing to me. And the most baffling part about it all is how she seemed completely clueless that any of this exists within her. Always passing the buck, never taking the responsibility. She'd make a great politician. At least I know I'm capable of being mean and I acknowledge when I have been and apologize for it. She did that, maybe, once or twice. Every other time it was empty apologies. She berated, she screamed, she told me to "shut the fuck up" and then she apologized later. And why did she operate this way? Because it was how her mom operated with her. As long as those nasty things that were said game with an apology, no matter how empty it was, all was supposed to be well again. And that was all it was supposed to take to smooth everything over. It did for awhile, too. Because I put up with her manipulative bullshit. That was my mistake, not calling her on her shit. I'd never let anyone else get away with half the crap she pulled, so what was so special about her that I let her run me down and then repeatedly back over me? Nothing. The only reason I kept coming back was because my savior complex reared its ugly head. I didn't want to leave her behind, I wanted her to see that good relationships are possible if you work at them. But I don't know that she even comprehends that, honestly. She seems content being stuck in the chaos of her dysfunction. And you can't help someone who won't help themselves. All I know is I just want to be happy. Feel love and give love and be without judgments on either side. I want that kinda fire and electricity that runs through your veins when you're so in love. I don't want to be angry anymore. I don't want to groan when the person I'm involved with contacts me. There are plenty of women out there who aren't mean girls, who aren't mindfucks and who want to be in a loving, stable relationship. And that's what I want. That's what I need.
I want a real love to let me
I want to zero out and be born again
No more false starts
And no more dead ends
