I'm Alive

It’s been a long time since I’ve watched these lights alone
I look around my life tonight and you are gone
I might have done something to keep you if I’d known
How unhappy you had become

The day I have been dreading for months and months has finally come. The day I have worried myself sick over, searched my soul for, and argued my hardest against has arrived and I have ultimately been proven powerless to stop it.

Today, my beautiful girl walked out of my world, taking with her everything I had hoped and dreamed for in this life.

While I was dreaming of you
With my heart in your hands
And I was following through
With my beautiful plans

The reasons she left are complex, and it wouldn’t be appropriate to share the details. Ultimately, Megan decided that she couldn’t be fully committed to our relationship in the way that I needed her to be and struck out on her own for whatever lies over the horizon. I can appreciate what she’s going through; the urge to run, to be free, to revel in the whimsical and pleasurable rather than sacrificing for a better tomorrow. I can appreciate her circumstance because I have the same urges.

I can appreciate and understand, but relationships, at their core, are about loyalty and commitment, and if she can’t stand beside me in the tough times as well as the good, how can I build a future with her? How can we build a life together if I cannot depend on her when things are rough going? In the end, I can’t. So there’s the rub.

I want to go where I will never hear your name
I want to lose my sorrow and be free again
And I know I’ve been insane
When I think of the places I could have been

I’ve been through breakups before, too many if you want my opinion about it, so this shouldn’t be new territory. But this one hurts like nothing I’ve ever experienced; it churns up my insides like a Kitchen-Aide mixer and plays with my emotions like a sick kid plays with a bug just before squishing it. I’ve thought and thought about why this separation punishes me so acutely and what I’ve come up with is that I had really bought in to my relationship with Megan. Whether I talked about it or not, I really thought she was the one and that we had a bright future in front of us, and I feel cheated to have that taken from me; to have it stolen right out of my hands.

Looking up and down this road
I’ve been here before
Can’t be here no more

Is this the end of Megan and I forever? Who knows, anything’s possible, but it certainly feels that way. In the end, I guess I don’t have much choice but to do what I’ve always done: wake up tomorrow and live it the best way I can. What other options are there? Not many (at least not many good ones). I do take solace in the fact that I gave Megan and my relationship with her literally everything I had; the problem was that I failed, not that I didn’t try, and I believe there is nobility in that. There’s a big part of me that will never really be over her, I don’t think I could claim to have ever loved her if there wasn’t, but I’m still me and I still have hope. I’ll be fine eventually…

…but it still hurts. So for now, I’m going to mourn the death of what could have been, the death of my life with my beautiful Snuggs, and think about what new dreams will replace the old.

Hey look at the way I believed in you
And loved you all these years
Now you can fill a swimming pool
With all my salted tears
If you’d have told me what was in your heart
Instead of all your lies
I thought that it would kill me
But I’m alive

Yeah, I’m alive.