Part 2 - The sands of time.....

…..ran inexorably slowly whilst I grieved. Grieved for the loss of our future together; for the loss of the perceived certainty of tomorrow; for the loss of the plans that we had together. Life stops. Just grinds to a halt. I was banjaxed. I’d accelerated slap bang wallop into a brick wall I didn’t see until it was much too late. Now every second felt like a minute, a minute an hour and a day an eternity. I had been sucker punched in the stomach and winded badly by his leaving so quickly and so suddenly. There hadn’t been enough time to absorb it all, to ask why, really why, he was going. I wished desperately for a fast forward button to speed me away from this nightmare part of my life; to take me past the hurt, the pain, the humiliation of rejection; of having to tell family and friends that he had gone and that I had been dumped on the middle aged scrap heap of life. Somehow it was easier to pretend that he had died for I couldn’t feel such shame and betrayal if he had just died; it wouldn’t have been his fault; I couldn’t then blame him or hate him for destroying my life because he never meant to; he just died; end of story; now get on with the grieving.

I felt a fraud grieving for a lost love, but it is grief, except I knew that one day it was inevitable that our paths would cross again. That one day I would have the anguish of seeing him happy and in love with someone else; I could easily have gouged my eyes out there and then to make sure I never captured that memory to replay for the rest of my life.

In the first real thrust of passion in the early days of our relationship he had promised that he would never hurt me. “How could you have lied so?”, I asked over and over. "If I had known how bad it felt to lose you then I would never have let myself love you so much".

My friend, my lover, my mentor, my future had bolted from my life and I knew not why.