The World Is Heavy When You Pay Attention

I won't say "Nobody Cares", an essay collection by Anne T. Donahue, was the reason my engagement ended, but I will go so far to say it was the first time I'd ever uttered to my ex that I was unhappy.

Maybe it's why it's taken me over a year to finish it; so many negative feelings were felt every time I'd pick up my copy.

When I first started this collection of essays, the introduction affected me so much I felt I needed to talk about it to someone. At the time, I had only two friends. One not so much a reader and one not so much an avid text-er, so I tried to read it aloud to my ex. A white flag of sorts at the end of the imaginary stick I was holding.

"What are you reading to me," he asked in the middle of my favorite part. The part I was getting most excited about. The part that felt the most like the deepest parts of me.

"What?" I said, and I could feel my hands starting to shake in frustration over being interrupted. Embarrassment, too, if I'm being honest. I had felt myself getting so excited while reading, feeling like I wanted him to see me in the sentences. I felt embarrassed for getting giddy. As though I was in the wrong. As though I had somehow confused him.

"I don't understand what you're reading to me," he said.

Because you don't understand me, I thought. How could I feel so much in between these words while it felt like he felt nothing. How could he not see my struggles within myself through the parts I'd chosen to read aloud. All my feelings, it felt like he never understood them.

There’s no going back once the scales tip.

"How can you not understand?" I said. It felt like I had a fire raging through me, one I'd been trying to put out for years.

One so hot I still feel it from time to time. A consistent reminder, protection in the present to ensure I never go back.

"I don't understand why you're so angry," he said. He was leaning against the dresser I hated but he wanted to buy because the old one didn't fit in our room. The old one, stuffed full of a life I could not seem to get away from. The new one I refused to be a part of. It held only his socks, his underwear, his shirts.

"Just be happy, Al."

I was so angry. I was so angry all of the time. For me, the last five years of my life revolved around being sensitive to someone else's feelings as though mine did not matter.

"You don't get me," I said. I was huddled under our duvet in a bed I couldn't fall asleep in. "You don't read. You don't feel the world and all of its heaviness. You do not see what I see."

I watched his eyes dart towards the floor and back up to me.

"I just wonder," I said, feeling braver than I'd ever felt before. Feeling angrier than I'd ever felt before. "What it would be like to be with someone who feels like I do."

"Well," he said, "we should probably figure this out since we're supposed to be getting married."

I watched him walk out, and I wondered how much longer I would have to be angry before he realized how unhappy I was. How interesting that the life I knew would keep me safe was the one I felt most trapped in. And, if I’m being honest, I still get angry when I remember how much I wanted a country club life. How I thought it would make me feel like I was finally enough. How I thought it would make me feel like I’d done my life the “right” way. But having two black Jeeps in a driveway of a half a million dollar home won’t make you happy if you don’t love the person you’re living with. Christmas parties across the street from the Estèe Lauder house mean nothing if you can barely look at yourself in the bathroom mirror.

“I hated when you were dating him,” my friend, Alex, said. “Going out with you wasn’t fun, you were always looking at your phone. You were frantic about getting home before he called you. Constantly stressed. He never shared you with me, with anyone.”

I stopped doing laundry because I wanted a way out.

My fear, though, would not let it happen.

"I'm sorry," I said because I knew I had no choice.

"You always say that," he said. "You're so selfish, Al."

Selfish because I went to every AA meeting with him for a year. Selfish because I didn't drink in front of him for almost two. Selfish because I wanted to go to Friday afternoon happy hours with my coworkers after a long week. Selfish because I didn't want to sit and watch eight hours of golf with him. Selfish because I hated the life I had chosen.

That’s the thing: I chose the life I was suffocating in, and I hated myself every day for not being strong enough to leave.

Every time I read, it was to get away from the moments I was barely surviving in.

"The thing that hurts me the most," Teri once told me, "is that he just thought you were an angry, spiteful child for no reason. He never saw you as the Alex I love; he never realized you were angry and spiteful and acted like a child because you weren't happy."

I hated that I'd changed everything about myself to fit into it thinking if I changed, that he’d change, too. He’d finally be what I wanted and needed.

It's easier to hate someone else than it is to hate yourself.

"What do you think of when you think of me?" I asked one night.

"What do you mean?"

"What words do you think of? How do you see me?"

"You're really pretty. I guess," he said as his eyes flickered towards the television that was on in the bedroom, "that I see you as ambitious."

"Okay," I said.

I was begging him for a reason to stay.

"Mature for your age," he said, "but, also, you're a little immature at times."  

I waited.

"Is that all?" I said.

"I'm not sure why you're asking me this."

And I read to escape.

I read and I read and I read to get away from the lies I was feeding myself. In my books, I didn't have to feel like I was trapped. In my books, I didn't have to sit in my own thoughts. In my books, I could convince myself that the character I wanted to marry only existed in fiction.

I'm not sad in a bad way, I text my friend, Alex, one day at work. Just, like, an overall feeling of sadness that comes with wondering if there is anyone in the world who really sees me, but that's impossible. How could anyone in the world really see all of you? I feel like I feel the world so heavy sometimes and no one can see that, so I just continue to carry it around alone. 

My phone chimed with his reply.

The world is distracted. Heavy because you pay attention.

“I started working on your wedding invitations,” Alex said as he walked by me.

I nodded, alone in my thoughts.

“You okay?” he said.

"How do you know," I whispered, "if you're making the right decision?"

“Oh.” He brushed my wrist, "You can talk to me."

I told him all of the things I felt I needed in a person. I needed someone who was on my level, someone who could see me when I was in my feels, someone who didn't force me to smile when I didn't feel like it, someone who wanted to go to my favorite places and vice versa. Someone who wanted to go to London with me. To Amsterdam. To the grocery store.

Someone who thought the world was art.

"Real life isn't that easy, Al," my ex said to me once. "I don't know what you'd do without me, you can't even do your own laundry."

Codependence is, without a doubt, paraphrased below:

"Why can't I put one of our bills in my name?"

"Your credit isn't as good as mine," he said.

I remember saving every single dollar I could, hoping one day I'd be able to leave. How many years I had to wait before I realized I could take care of myself. Before I realized I'd been made to feel like I couldn't do it by both him and myself.

I paid my first electricity bill on my own in 2019; I'd never felt stronger in my life than the day I finished a bowl of cereal on my couch in the apartment I'd leased.

I'd never felt stronger than when my best friend and I packed up every single book I owned into tiny boxes, tossing them down the stairs of a house I never felt at home in.

"I am so tired of helping you move," she said.

I loved her for it.

"I'll pack up the kitchen," she said.

"I'll get the books."

My ex and I were on the phone a month after we'd decided to take a break from our relationship.

"I don't have anyone to come home to," he said. "I come home and there is no one here to have dinner with."

I'd never let it go, what he said. Anyone. As though I was just someone in this large world of someones. Anyone. I could have been anyone, as long as I loved him.

I'd imagine getting married to him, but, every time I turned the corner, towards the aisle, it was never him standing at the end. At the end was someone I was comfortable singing in front of. At the end was someone who read to me, someone who I could read to. Someone who kissed my forehead because they knew I loved it. Someone who wanted to travel the world with me. Someone I could walk down the street with for ice cream. Someone who looked at me and saw more than just "pretty" and "ambitious" and "mature" and "a bit immature". Someone who felt magic the same way I feel it when I turn on my new balcony lights every night.

Someone who could tell when I needed space to be in my own thoughts and feelings. Someone who could feel.

"I don't think I'm in love with you," my ex said on Christmas evening. "I've felt sick all day about it."

I felt a hitch in my chest, but it wasn't sadness. It was a moment of hope; like everything I'd been wanting to happen was finally happening, but it was happening without me being ready for it.

"Are you in love with me?" he asked.

I could see him waiting for my answer.

"Al," he said. "Stop staring"

We were at his best friend's wedding in Washington a few years prior, and I remember being too tipsy to stand. You know, the kind of dazed-drunk where you can't feel your face anymore. I kept pushing at my cheek with my fingers in hopes something would happen, but I felt nothing next to him. I wanted to feel something.

I couldn't stop looking at the couple in front of me on the dance floor. I don't remember the song they were dancing to, but I do remember the way his hair toppled over his face and the way her dress spun around her thighs and the way he looked at her as though he saw her. These grins on their faces that I'd wished I had on mine.

"I like watching them dance," I said.

"You're staring."

But how could I not when the realization that had been slowly creeping into my life for three years was finally present.

I am not in love with him.

And I wasn't. Not in the way I needed to be in love with someone.

I made his life as difficult as he'd made mine, but, in a sense, I was much worse. How could I ever blame him for not being able to understand me when I was never able to be Alex in front of him. I never sang in front of him. Not once in the five years we dated did I ever dance with him alone in our home. I never played my music for him. Never once did I ever tell him what my favorite song was.

Deep down, I knew he wasn't capable of making love with me and so I never let him.

I became the nicknames he called me: Bertie, Pattie, Al.

Never Alex. I didn't realize how much I missed the sound of my own name until I started working around people who used it when they talked to me.

It is so much easier to hate someone else than to forgive yourself for burying your most favorite parts of you.

To him, I was as complicated as the sentences I tried to read to him. I was a run-on. Irony. The things you can’t easily make sense of. It wasn't his fault that he couldn't understand, but I wanted to force him to. I wanted him to understand me because, perhaps, if he did, it would give me a reason to stay.

“I think you want him to be in love with her,” Faye said to me once when we were talking about his coworker he was seeing. I begged him to admit any kind of feelings for her every time I'd find her hair, her jewelry, her clothes. I thank the universe for her constantly. Without her, I’d be married to anyone.

“Why would I want that?” I said.

“Because,” she said, “if he were, it would mean you could finally leave.”

It has taken me over a year to really read again.

"Maybe, before you open a book, you could write down why you read," a man who is not anyone recently said to me. "That way, you'll be able to see you're not reading to escape anymore.”

I get it, now, that real love is selfless. It took an entire year, a year of massive, amazing, painful, and exhilarating fuck-ups that lead me to learning lessons, and meeting the right person and the right people for me to really get it. When you love someone, you let them have their own life. With or without you.

You let them live.