On Thursday while talking to some women who work with me about ex-boyfriends I realized it had been too long since I had gotten a Facebook message or text from my ex asking for nudes or sending me some random funny shit.

With a sinking feeling in my stomach, but some hope maybe he was just in jail again, I hit google and immediately found his obituary.

It hit me pretty fucking hard.

Leaving him was one of the hardest things I ever did. I tried everything I could to fix him for a year and… yeah. He just kept falling apart harder.

The obit called his last girlfriend the love of his life and I am sure she was. We all were, long before and long after me. She was the chair he was in when the music stopped, and Goddess, I both envy and Do Not Envy her for that. Christ.

I am attracted to men. A lot. But I don’t tend to feel romantically towards them, it happens from time to time, but Sir was my daddy and my baby and my man. And he’s gone and it knocked me down.

I saw someone hit by a bus once. Ten feet from me. It felt like that.

I did great at work on Friday. I had no choice really so that helped. But I felt like I had been hit in the gut with a bag of bricks.

And I had to remind myself in the mirror

“D, you left him far away and long ago.”

Which was fair, but so was my response

“Yeah but you still sent nudes when he asked and you would have sent bail money to his mom, whose fucking number you still have, again, and probably paid for a lawyer, so don’t act like he was already dead to you.”

Also fair. I fight fair 🤷🏻‍♀️ I’m good like that.

So first I felt broken. Then I started to feel like maybe the things that broke were already fragile and on life support… Part of me is defeated, broken, dying…

But now the rest of me feels softer… newer maybe?

I don’t believe I will ever love another man like I loved him. Or anything remotely like it.

And I think that’s probably for the best. It didn’t always bring out the best in me to love a man like that and I had to run from him like a coward in the end, not because he would hurt me, but because he couldn’t stop hurting himself in front of me.

This isn’t some feel-good story about me leaving a bad situation so I could go on to great things and all that shit. Sure I could sell it that way but it ain’t the truth.

The truth is I would have written bad checks for that man. If I stayed, if I had met the decision to stick with my fucking man, well, I would have probably done a lot worse than that. But I ran.

Good move for me, the whole me. For the human being D? Hallmark movie shit. But it was inevitable really because rule number one is survive. I didn’t put that rule there, but it’s there in a way most people don’t understand. And it was killing my soul to watch this.

But for a part of me, the part of me that loved a man like he was my King and I was his ride or die fucking bottom bitch, for that part of D, that move was fatal. And while it took 11 years for her to bleed out, she’s in her last days. She can no longer survive without the hope that I could ever even just for a night or a minute feel his arms around me again and feel a kind of safety I have felt for probably less than 3 or 4 hundred hours in my entire life.

Because James couldn’t hurt me. It was impossible. And by that, I do not mean that he was incapable of causing me physical or emotional harm. He was totally capable of both. I mean that the way I loved My Man was such that he could have knifed me and I would have died as sexy as I could have for my daddy. And I wasn’t afraid of that. I wanted it. I cried out for it.

But I couldn’t watch him kill himself. That was something my soul could not withstand and so I did not ride and die, I ran.

D lives on, but the part of her that loved a man like THAT is fading away in my arms as I write a song for him. And I expect she’ll be gone by the time I record it. I will hold her hand and kiss her forehead and say goodbye to her as this new me stands up and spreads her wings towards the future like a moth.

Which is what I do.

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