Harvey Read

Standing in the Dark alone with no one around

H has gone.

And I am standing in what feels like a very dark room.

There is no path beneath my feet. There are no signs telling me which direction to take. I cannot see a door, and right now I cannot see where my life is supposed to go.

I feel lost.

I feel alone.

There are days when I look at myself and feel ugly, unwanted and completely forgotten. There are moments when my mind tells me that I will always be alone, that nobody will ever love me again, care for me again or stand beside me again.

As I stand in that imaginary dark room, tears run down my cheeks.

Everything feels cold.

I feel frightened, shivery and alone.

Sometimes it feels as though I could remain there for eternity.

I’m not writing these words for attention or sympathy. I’m writing them because this page is about what has happened to me and what it has actually done to my life.

Pretending that I’m fine would simply be a lie.

What happened to my relationship

H and I shared four years together.

Four years cannot simply be deleted.

There were good times, bad times, laughter, arguments, stupid jokes, memories and ordinary moments that probably meant nothing to anybody else but meant everything to us.

There was love.

Certainly from me.

H was my second great love.

I loved him, supported him and tried to stand beside him whenever he needed me.

That was what I believed a relationship was supposed to be.

Love. Care. Support. Trust. Honesty.

Being there for one another when things become difficult.

You don’t just love somebody when everything is easy.

The real test comes when life becomes difficult.

That is one of the reasons the ending has hurt me so badly.

Because when my own world started collapsing, I felt that the person I thought would understand me turned his back and walked away.

H and R

H and R are now together and engaged.

I believe their relationship was taking place while H and I were still together. From what I discovered and experienced, I regard what happened as cheating during our relationship.

H had previously told me words to the effect:

“I would never cheat on my partner.”

I believed him.

When you love somebody, you should be able to believe what they tell you.

When I started questioning things, I wanted honesty.

If H didn’t love me anymore, I wish he had told me.

If he wanted somebody else, I wish he had told me.

If our relationship had already finished in his heart, I wish he had sat down and said so.

The truth would have hurt.

Discovering things afterwards hurt considerably more.

I also questioned things I had seen, including an engagement ring.

Again, all I wanted was honesty.

Today, H and R are engaged.

I congratulate them on their engagement.

Their lives are now theirs.

And somehow I have to make my life mine again.

The questions nobody answered

My head continues asking questions.

Why did you cheat on me?

Why did you lie to my face when I confronted you?

Why couldn’t you have been honest with me from day one?

Why did you lie when I asked about the engagement ring?

Was I ever enough for you?

Were you ever truly happy?

How long had this actually been happening?

Why couldn’t you simply tell me that you wanted somebody else?

And one of the biggest questions:

Why did you turn your back on me when I desperately needed support?

I may never receive those answers.

That is incredibly difficult for me.

My mind keeps trying to solve something for which pieces are missing.

It replays conversations.

It remembers promises.

It analyses things that happened months or years ago.

Then another question appears.

And another.

That is why closure became so important to me.

I wasn’t asking to restart our relationship

When I asked for closure, I wasn’t secretly asking H to come back.

I wasn’t asking him to abandon his new relationship.

I wasn’t asking him to fix my entire life.

I wanted one calm, adult conversation.

No shouting.

No fighting.

Just honesty.

There were occasions when H shouted while speaking to me and, because of my hearing difficulties, I couldn’t understand what he was saying.

When somebody is shouting, communication becomes even harder for me.

I wanted a conversation where we could both speak and both listen.

I wanted to understand why.

Eventually I have had to confront something I didn’t want to accept:

I may never get my answers from H.

When I needed support

At exactly the same time that my relationship was falling apart, something else was happening.

Aska.

I remember looking into Aska’s eyes and seeing something that frightened me.

Something had changed.

My boy was seriously ill.

I knew our time together was becoming limited.

At that point I couldn’t properly explain what was happening inside my own head because I hadn’t processed it myself.

I reached out to H.

I needed support from somebody who had known me for four years.

I needed the person I thought loved me to understand that I was frightened.

Instead, I felt that he turned his back on me.

And that hurt beyond words.

What all of this has actually done to me

This hasn’t simply made me sad.

It has affected almost every part of my life.

My confidence has collapsed.

My trust in other people has been badly damaged.

There are times when I don’t want to leave my home.

There are times when the anxiety becomes so strong that ordinary things suddenly feel enormous.

I have experienced panic attacks.

My mind races.

I replay everything.

Sometimes I cannot switch it off.

At night, when everything becomes quiet, the thoughts can become even louder.

Why?

What did I do wrong?

Why wasn’t I enough?

How could somebody I trusted do this?

Why couldn’t he just tell me the truth?

That cycle has exhausted me.

There have been days when I’ve slept because being awake and thinking about everything feels harder.

There have been days when I have barely wanted food.

There have been periods when looking after myself properly has become incredibly difficult.

Things that should be automatic — eating, sleeping, taking care of myself and getting through an ordinary day — have sometimes felt like enormous tasks.

My physical health has also frightened me.

I have experienced severe problems with my blood pressure and frightening physical symptoms, including heaviness and numbness.

Stress doesn’t stay neatly inside your head.

When you live under intense emotional pressure for long enough, you can feel it throughout your entire body.

I’ve felt exhausted.

I’ve felt weak.

I’ve felt frightened by what my own body is doing.

And that creates another cycle: I become frightened about my health, which creates more anxiety, which makes everything else harder.

I’ve lost confidence in myself

Perhaps one of the cruellest things this has done is change how I see myself.

Before all of this, I didn’t constantly question whether I was good enough.

Now I do.

I look at myself and sometimes think:

I’m ugly.

I’m too old.

Nobody is going to want me.

I’m going to be alone forever.

I know other people may look at those sentences and disagree.

But this page isn’t about what somebody else sees when they look at me.

It is about what I currently see when I look at myself.

My self-esteem has been knocked down so badly that sometimes I struggle to imagine somebody genuinely choosing me again.

And when the person you trusted chooses somebody else, your mind starts asking whether there was something wrong with you all along.

That has been one of the hardest thoughts to fight.

I’ve become isolated

Another major effect has been loneliness.

I’m home alone.

There are days when I desperately want somebody to talk to.

Not somebody to solve everything.

Just somebody there.

Somebody to sit beside me.

Somebody to ask:

“Are you alright?”

Somebody to have an ordinary conversation with.

Sometimes ordinary human company is what I miss most.

When you have spent years having somebody in your everyday life, their disappearance creates an enormous silence.

It isn’t just losing a boyfriend.

You lose routines.

Messages.

Conversations.

Inside jokes.

Plans.

Someone sitting in the room.

Someone knowing what sort of day you’ve had.

Suddenly there is empty space everywhere.

Trust has been damaged

I don’t know whether I will ever completely trust another partner.

Right now, I cannot imagine letting somebody close enough to hurt me like this again.

If somebody tells me they love me, will part of my mind wonder whether they’re lying?

If somebody says they’re going somewhere, will I question whether they’re really somewhere else?

If somebody promises they’ll never cheat, will those words mean anything to me anymore?

I don’t want to become somebody who distrusts everybody.

But betrayal changes something.

Trust takes years to build and moments to destroy.

I don’t yet know how to rebuild mine.

Then there is Aska

While trying to deal with all of this, I’m watching my beautiful boy fight cancer.

Aska has been part of my family for sixteen years.

He isn’t “just a dog.”

He is family.

He has been beside me through enormous parts of my life.

He doesn’t judge me.

He doesn’t care whether I’m attractive.

He doesn’t care how much money I have.

He doesn’t care whether I’ve made mistakes.

He simply knows me.

And he loves me.

His cancer is progressing and more growths have appeared.

Sooner or later I may have to make the decision every person who loves an animal dreads.

I may have to let my boy go.

I’m already grieving him

This is something people don’t always understand.

You can start grieving somebody before they’re gone.

I look at Aska and love having him beside me.

But another part of my mind knows what is coming.

I notice changes.

I watch him.

I worry.

Sometimes I look at him and wonder how much time we have left.

That is an incredibly painful way to live.

I’m trying to enjoy every day I still have with him while another part of me is terrified of the last one.

I know there may eventually be a day when I go to the vets with Aska and return home without him.

I dread opening that front door.

The silence.

His place being empty.

His little sounds gone.

No Aska looking at me.

No Aska beside me.

My mind tells me that on that day the dark room will become even darker.

Two losses became tangled together

This is perhaps the biggest thing people need to understand about what happened to me.

I haven’t been dealing with one loss.

I’ve been dealing with two enormous losses at almost the same time.

One already happened.

One is approaching.

I lost the relationship and the person I thought would stand beside me.

Then, when I desperately needed support to cope with Aska’s cancer, I felt that person disappear too.

The breakup became connected with my fear of losing Aska.

The betrayal became connected with loneliness.

The unanswered questions became connected with anxiety.

Everything became tangled together.

That is why this hasn’t been something I could simply “get over.”

I have forgiven a lot

I have forgiven H for a lot.

There were things said.

There were misunderstandings.

There were things that may have been misheard.

There were moments when emotions were extremely high.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean pretending something didn’t happen.

It doesn’t mean saying something was acceptable.

And it doesn’t mean forgetting.

Sometimes forgiveness simply means:

I refuse to let this consume every remaining part of me.

I still love H — but something is changing

I would be lying if I wrote that I suddenly stopped loving H.

I haven’t.

You don’t switch four years of love off overnight.

Part of me still loves him.

But every day that passes makes that love a little weaker.

Every week creates a little more distance.

Knowing H and R are together has forced me to accept something I desperately resisted:

H has chosen his path.

And eventually I have to find mine.

To H

I loved you.

I supported you.

I stood beside you.

When you needed my help, I tried to help because I genuinely wanted you to succeed.

Despite everything, I don’t wish you harm.

I don’t want revenge.

I wanted answers.

I wanted closure.

I wanted one conversation where neither of us shouted and where we could speak as two adults who once shared four years of our lives.

I wanted to understand why.

Perhaps I never will.

There are things you did that I have forgiven.

There are things that still hurt.

There are things I probably won’t ever understand.

But I cannot force you to explain them.

To H and R

You are engaged now.

I congratulate you.

Whatever happened in the past, your future belongs to you.

I hope one day the anger and hurt inside me disappear completely.

Not for you.

For me.

Because I don’t want what happened controlling the rest of my life.

To Aska

My beautiful boy.

You are still here.

So this isn’t your goodbye.

Not yet.

Today I can still sit beside you.

Today I can still cuddle you.

Today I can still look into those eyes.

Today I can still tell you:

I love you, boy.

When your time eventually comes, I know another piece of my heart will break.

But sixteen years of love cannot be destroyed by one heartbreaking final day.

You have been there when humans haven’t.

You have loved me without conditions.

And until your final moment, I will be there for you.

The dark room

So where am I now?

I’m still standing in that dark room.

There are still tears running down my cheeks.

I still feel cold.

I still feel frightened.

Sometimes I feel ugly.

Sometimes I feel unwanted.

Sometimes I believe nobody will ever love me again.

I still cannot clearly see a path beneath my feet.

But maybe being unable to see a path doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

I’m not going to pretend everything is suddenly okay.

It isn’t.

I’ve lost confidence.

I’ve lost trust.

I’ve experienced anxiety and panic.

I’ve struggled with my health.

I’ve struggled to eat.

I’ve struggled to take care of myself.

I’ve become isolated.

I’ve questioned my own worth.

I’ve lost the relationship I thought I had.

And now I am preparing myself for the loss of my beautiful boy.

That is what all of this has done to me.

I don’t know how long I’ll be standing in this darkness.

I don’t know where the door is.

I don’t know what waits outside it.

But somewhere underneath all of this pain, one fact remains:

I’m still here.

And as long as I’m still here, my story isn’t finished.

Everyday I am feeling lost Empty broken and nothing more than a worthless person on this planet. I keep asking myself why am i still here why am i still breaking why am i still walking i should be 10 feet under no one will ever notice i am no longer here no will ever relise i am gone no one will ever relise i am no longer breathing no one acutally really cares at all in anyway.

whats the point carrying on after askas goes this will be no more for me anywhere no need to stay no needs to be here no need to breath anymore as i loss myself utterly and indefianetly

this world is cruel everytime to me everytime my world gets turned upside down and inside im tired of this everything so why do i continue with this life. theres nothing out there for me there all the same they turn to be the same person whom runined me.

as i sit here tying i still see the black room no path no light no air tears frozen to my face into icecubes the breath i relised turned into snow dust no one in sight no ones in reach no ones around just my outer shell frozen in the dark room unable ot talk breath or wipe my face. i think as i cant move this is it this is the end this is the final time for me the final time…….. continues soon more to come