That hollow feeling

The days after he left were surreal.  Everything carried on but there was a quiet around me, a feeling of disbelief that it had ended.  It was my choice, I don't claim otherwise, but it felt like my world had been wrenched apart and this hollow, numb feeling set in where I couldn't quite believe it. 

In some ways there was relief - he could't hurt me again, I wouldn't be undermined again and I would't be left to second guess his thinking again but that didn't ever seem to help. It still doesn't.  I started to unravel what had been going wrong in the months before and gradually came to realise some things had been wrong all along.

But you never see these things when you're falling in love and in my case, I'd been single for so long, I didn't take long enough to check myself or really question things that I should have from the start.   I fell for this big, gentle, seemingly open man who was clearly head over heels in love with me, and I never stopped to think what all the emotional baggage (and there was masses) would actually entail.

In some ways, that's made coming through this harder.  It's my mistake to not have seen things for red flags, or to have batted them aside without questioning or thinking harder.   I was so desperate to make it work after being alone for a long time that I simply didn't see what was probably evident to everyone around me.   Or more to the point, I might have seen it but I chose to overlook or side step.

And now I tell myself I was a fool.  And I blame myself for the choices I made when I could/should have done things differently.  And that in itself makes the healing process so hard because all I did was love someone and all I ever tried to do was make the relationship work.   Look where it got me.