My level of naivety was breathtakingly crushing. Her depressions would come like rolling bouts of heavy rain and soul-piercing thunder. I would be a good boyfriend and talk her out of whatever deep hole she was in. I was never sure if I was helping, but sooner or later, she would regain her joie de vivre, and the sun would come out again. But now I know that the reason why those dark early days were so hard to battle was because I was probably the main source of her depressions.
I guess she was looking for a savior who could shield her from the prickly world outside, but I was—she clearly could see—struggling just as much as she was. Correction: I actually, and sincerely, thought that at least we were struggling together. Like the Dutch say: “A shared pain is half the pain.” But she knew all along that there was an out for her, an easy way out, perhaps. And for that path, she would need to go her own way. Away from her old, soul-grinding life. Away from me.
I began by saying that my naivety knew no bounds. Toward the end of our relationship, I started to notice that her dark days became fewer and fewer, and I internally breathed a sigh of relief. It is crazy how, when our relationship was about to go over a cliff, I genuinely thought that she had become calmer, less erratic. I thought how all that hardship and pain were slowly paying off. But that calmness in her was probably because she had already made up her mind; she was going to start a new chapter in her life, and she was going to do that without me.
Ah, the foolishness of a man who is blessed with all his faculties but still too blinded by love to see what was happening in front of him, in the heart of the one person he thought he knew through and through.
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