Nora Kinkaid Wants Her Life Back

No Warning

The truth is I don't want to date because I already met my soul's half and we are working on things. Sometimes I doubt what I am seeing is real. But I know what I feel is real and it hurts me to feel his pain. Especially when he isn't releasing it. It just gets buried underneath another layer of unmentionables. I wonder if I'm an unmentionable. I suspect I am. And why wouldn't I be. I broke his heart. I cheated and lied. If he were to really say what he wanted to say I wonder what would be directed at me. As I write this I feel the words, his not mine, bubble into my throat. I feel choked by them, like I should just keep quiet. He shouldn't do that. He needs to say something to whoever it is he feels stifled around. The main question I have is why me? Why am I involved in his spiritual journey? What reason is there? Spry, I can feel him trying to figure it out. The words are caught at the back of my throat blocked. He's trying to release it. It's tenuous.

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I didn't give him any warning. I didn't even have much warning. I had the phone ringing in my hand before I knew what I was doing and it just came out.

"I just can't do this anymore. It doesn't feel happy and fun. It feels like too much effort for how short a period it had been." He said he understood. He said he was bummed but he completely got where I was coming from. I told him we could talk when I got back to Boston and I cried on Bedford Street for fifteen minutes. There wasn't much more to it than that. The only thing I recall from that day is feeling restless and keyed up. I went for a walk to try to get some of the woolies out. That's what I call anxious feeling - the woolies. I walked quickly, making it downtown in under fifteen minutes. It would normally take me forty. When I rounded the corner in front of the Friends building, you know their apartment? That corner. I stopped dead in my tracks and tried to take in fresh air. But I couldn't catch my breath. I ran my hand over my heart and willed it to release. I called in any energy I could think of to make my heart soften just a little bit so I could release the tension I had been holding for so long.

It didn't budge. The next thing I remember is the phone ringing and hearing his voice. He didn't sound upset. He took it in stride. If anything, he was void of emotion which is odd now that I think about it. Maybe it's not odd. Maybe that's just who he was. Someone who doesn't get spun out of their emotional orbit with every feeling bomb their girlfriend drops on them. God I was a mess. Even as I write this I'm embarrassed by how much of a handful I was.

Yes, yes I know self-blame isn't a cute look. But I'm okay with it on this front. I can't imagine that he was upset when we broke up because he had every right to be relieved. I had put him through the ringer the last three months. I had been this bright, amazing and charismatic woman who had devolved into someone who was seeing things in dark corners, being tortured by her own mind and had portals in her living room. Not exactly the person you bring home to mom.

The feeling I must associate with this time is confusion. I kept asking myself and others, how did I get here? Because I had no clue. How did I get to this space of such harm and disarray that I was pushing away the person that cared about me or at least said they did?

Before we hung up I told him I was sorry. I was so sorry and I really was. I still am. I only have two regrets in life. Cheating on him and breaking up with him. Every other decision I've ever made I've made my peace with. But I can't make it with this. I've tried. I keep trying. Tess says I'm chorded to him still. That means there's an energetic link between me and him that I keep maintaining. After all this time, I keep myself energetically linked to him. I know the chord is there. Each time I try to get rid of it a part of me seizes up in fear. It won't let him go.

I hung up the phone and walked home crying the whole way. It was a very New York moment. Lovesick woman in workout clothes sobs silently to herself as she ambles up Fifth Avenue. Quite the spectacle. I waited until New Years to tell my family we had broken up. I couldn't handle the looks of disappointment and confusion they gave me. I spent New Year's with my siblings and ignored the fact that neither of us reached out to wish each other a Happy New Year. I drank five glasses of champagne and didn't care if I was drunk. I had made a mistake. Many of them in fact. But the largest one I had made was breaking up with him. I tried to convince myself it was the right call. I needed space to heal I told myself. I can't heal when I'm constantly in an up and down with him. But I know my reasons now were bullshit. I was so afraid of falling in love with him that I made it absolutely impossible we ever could again. That's the skill of a master soul. We create messes we can't get out of. My mess with Oliver will be my next soul iteration's problem. There's no way I can solve it in this lifetime.

When I got back to Boston, he took our Christmas trip alone. The day he was leaving I sat on my couch and stared at my phone. I agonized over texting him. The amount of times I picked up the phone to call him and put it back down. It was torture. I knew when he was leaving and texted him. I figured it would take Tom with him so I didn't dare ask who he was going with. I wanted desperately to say, "wait I've made a huge mistake. Can I please come with you so we can talk about this? So we can figure out what is going on? I can be ready in a half hour. Please Oliver , can you forgive me?" But I was so scared that he would say, "sorry I'm taking someone else" that the embarrassment would kill me. How fucking dumb is that. I thought the embarrassment would kill me but I've been living with the pain of life without him for almost a whole year and it hasn't killed me. Interesting how the mindset of fear plays tricks on you isn't it?

He texted me back. He said we could talk when he got home but he was hitting the road. I almost asked for the address and considered renting a car. It was a snowstorm that weekend but I didn't care. I would have gone had fear not stopped me in my tracks. I feel this fear as I write. It sits right underneath my chest, in the soft spot where my bra sits. It feels dumb, like it shouldn't' be there. Why would fear even sit in that spot to begin with? It hovers between the typical spots of fear like my stomach and my chest which makes it extra noticeable and frustrating to alleviate.

When he got back, he came over and we talked. We actually had dinner. We sat across from each other and I ordered sushi. We talked about why we didn't work and both of us coped to our shortcomings. We agreed to break up again. It was the right thing. We didn't have time for one another. We weren't compatible, we didn't match. We said all the things that you say when you don't want to admit that you're really sad it didn't work. We ate and split a bottle of wine and the only thing we didn't say to each other was I'm sorry. I really was sorry. I was sorry that I didn't try harder to make it work because I really did love him. In spite of his shortcoming and my own I knew there was a connection there, one that has yet to be severed. But I never said it. I let him hug me goodbye and told him the honest truth, this was the most affection he had given me in the last two months of our relationship. And for that, he apologized.