CDear Ester, I’ve been reading you for a long time. I wonder if you’ll ever read me. My story has nothing special except that it is mine. 13 years together, from university, many, from 22 to 35, 4 of living together. I who believed that we could resist time and be my “he”; then when we really should have grown up, especially because I needed a mature relationship, I wanted a child, I found myself discovering a person who was my family and my best friend who started lying to me and while he was telling me how to make wedding favors and to stop taking the pill because of course he wanted a child, while we were planning the future, in the meantime he was working with a colleague with whom he came out in the open a year after our breakup, without having admitted anything in the meantime, without apologizing to me, without confronting me or telling me the truth. In fact I was the crazy one who believed there was someone else and I had also identified who it was. We always know it. He left me the day he told me he was going to propose to me, after the I love you’s the day before. Apparently it’s called false self in psychology. Now he avoids me, runs away if he sees me, he has never looked me in the eye and apologized. Another person I didn’t know existed inside him.
When the pain is discovering that the box was empty
Stories end, cheating happens, what tore me to pieces was knowing that I had been living in a box that he knew had been empty for months or maybe years and which he kept because I had never put him against the wall, what tore me to pieces was hearing myself say just because I questioned everything “you know it would be bad to marry you”.. otherwise he would have continued to take my time, my life.
After the breakup: the war of small things
And now that he already lives with that other one, he continues to make war on me, teasing me about the things he has to return to me, he makes me ask for the payment receipts from the lawyers, I don’t answer him like keep everything and he says that they are useless, that he gives me back the paintings but takes away the frames… shouldn’t he be satisfied instead of frustrated?
How do you grow together, divide everything and within a few minutes become a stranger capable of trampling on the person with whom you have shared a life?
Ester Viola’s response
Dear N.
What happens after you’ve fallen in love? Some remain friends (?), for others there is great indifference and great hatred.
Are there people who are impervious to the pain of others?
Are there people who are fireproof to everything and very capable of not caring about how it is on the other side?
They exist.
Are there those who think love is a detail, if it goes wrong it’s not a tragedy for them and it shouldn’t be a tragedy for the poor Christ they leave under the rubble?
They exist.
Are there people who want you but not too much, for a whole series of unrealized/happened circumstances that are necessary for the chemical reaction of long-term love?
Exists.
How much time to spend on the word “why”
You are – have been, will always be – in one of three hypotheses, and, regardless of which, you have to choose how much time you want to spend asking yourself why. Perhaps just in general, one in life must ask himself how much time to dedicate to the word why.
Don’t tell me you’re looking for the land of consequences that arithmetically follow the premises, of undisappointed hopes, the land of logic. The country of people who say things and then they are the same, the country of undisappointed expectations, the country of things that are built and then it never rains on them, the country where you don’t roll lottery numbers all the time, every minute, for anything. Don’t tell me you hope the country of stability exists, N.
The bulletin of good things
I don’t know how those who make it do it, N.. From the middle of the journey, however, I and my now almost perpetual back pain are able to give you the first dispatch on loves, disaffections, Sarratori and other males who are defective or with few qualities: it seems that making a bulletin of the good things you’ve done works a little better than making a list of those that are missing. And that it is better not to burden love, every love, with every responsibility for adjusting, defining and improving what goes around us. Lovers are the temporarily happy ones in life, that’s all, and that’s not enough.
Happy are the happy, that’s what he said. For others – if they don’t start thinking about it themselves – we don’t know what to do.
