Behind the Clouds

Chapter 23 11/9/14

Last night, I exhausted myself from crying that Eric let me sleep in his guest bedroom in his apartment. I woke up with a cooling gel eye mask covering my eyes. I guess Eric assumed my eyes would be puffy in the morning. They felt still a little swollen and hurt a bit, but I was glad the mask was there to help ease the pain. If only it helped with easing the pain I felt internally. I ached so much that I could barely move my body an inch. Wasn’t sure if it was from all of the crying I did or last night’s amazing heartbreak.

            If I had to choose what moment hurt more physically, I would say when my dad raped me. If I had to choose a moment that hurt mentally and emotionally, it was last night. To be perfectly honest, I felt a lot worse now compared to the night after he did it. Basically, it feels like the night after it times five. Maybe times ten even. I’m probably exaggerating and people have probably felt so much worse, but it feels like my world just got hit with an atom bomb. They say when you first fall in love, it hits you like a car crash. What people leave out is what it feels like if that love were to fail. You just feel dead inside. That’s what I feel like. At some point, I heard light knocks on the door and the creak of the hinges when it was opened a little.

            “Elle, you awake?” Eric whispered. I contemplated just pretending I was still asleep to be with myself for the rest of the day...but that’s exactly what I didn’t need.

I nodded.

I heard his footsteps coming towards me and felt the dip in the bed when he tried to get under the covers. I didn’t move from my position on my side facing the wall, but he just put his hand against my back and slowly rubbed up and down soothingly. “It’s gonna be ok,” he whispered. I felt the emotion in my throat and used what strength I had left to prevent myself from crying again. So I just turned and faced him and decided that he should know why I showed up on his doorstep in pieces and incapable of controlling the floodgates.

“You wanna know what happened last night?” I whispered. I felt him nod.

Every minute I took to explain it was agonizing. It was painful to mentally relive it, but a bit helpful in the coping process. I hadn’t dealt with heartbreak before since I didn’t expect to ever find someone that would break it. It all felt foreign and weird, but in a way I was grateful that I was able to say that I’ve experienced it.

When I finally finished, Eric didn’t say anything. He just started stroking my hair to relax me. Then he put his arm around my waist and pulled me in closer. “Elle, can I say something?” He said.

“Yeah,” I whispered.

“I’m sorry. For both of you. I don’t know if I can speak for him when I say this, but maybe he’s feeling just the same as you. I’m not taking sides. I’m just telling it how I think it is. It’s too hard to really be able to see who’s at fault because...I hate to say, but you both are almost exactly the same. Obviously, you’re different in ways, but despite those differences you both complement each other. That’s how I think it kept you two together. What brought you down is both of your inabilities to open up. You refuse to ever accept the similarities and see that in the end you really need that to hold each other up.

“We won’t know if this is for the good or the bad, Elle. We really just have to wait and see, but if anything this is a good thing right now because now maybe you’ll realize the flaws in your relationship. But instead of looking at those flaws as bad things, look at them as helpful guidelines to see if maybe in the future something good may come out the other end of this story. Ok?”

When he finished I really thought about it. I mean at this moment, I’m was full of negative energy. The sun is completely dimmed and cold and who knows when it’ll ever brighten back up again. If ever. At this point, all seems hopeless.