Ten little words in black and white typeface. Words I wasn't expecting. At least not yet. Words that twisted my stomach and dried my mouth. Made my hands shake and fingertips go cold. As they danced before my eyes, the crystalline palace I had erected about myself shattered.
I had one of those heart-stopping moments today, where you realize something about yourself that you probably always knew, but never really acknowledged. You know the feeling...a sudden squeeze at your heart, a physical reaction to a mental realization. A tingly-frozen feeling in the pit of your stomach, akin to panic or the stomach-drop sensation when you know someone is on the verge of telling you some very bad news.
Was the news I received really that earth-shattering? No. I knew it would come some day. I suppose I just wasn't expecting to have to face it in the stone-cold, no ifs ands or buts about it, reality of facebook. "In a relationship with." It implies intimacy and a sense of forever. "Dating" would be so much easier to accept.
And I realized how self-centered I am. How self-centered we all are. I can try my hardest to see things from other people's perspectives, to step outside the box, take a walk in their shoes. But in the end, it's from my own unique--and utterly self-centered--vantage point from which I view the world. I am still, at base, the infant who doesn't understand that the world outside of me doesn't freeze when I'm not directly involved--that people move on in their own directions and forget about me and my world.
The thing about us egotistical humans (or perhaps it's just me...who knows) is that we never expect to be replaced. Even if I have already replaced the person in question. In my own little world of pink ponies and butterflies, no one will ever get over the loss of moi, the one and only. I reign as queen of Lauraland, and outside of that, nothing ever happens or changes.
The weird thing, the thing that led to the sudden panic and twisting in my stomach, is that I never realized I had created Lauraland in the first place. It just kind of cropped up. And I only realized it was there when it shattered into a million little pieces of rose-tinted glass. And all because of those stupid ten words. And that stupider social networking system. (By the way, this is only part of the reason I deactivated my account tonight. But that's another post for another day.)
The more I pondered this broken fortress, the more its presence spread before my eyes, until it overshadowed much more than just this one long-ended relationship. It covered all relationships, not just those of a romantic nature. Friends I've grown apart from, people I was once so close to but didn't make enough of an effort to maintain the relationship--they've all moved on. I don't really matter anymore.
Of course, I did realize all of this in one part of my brain. The rational, practical portion. You know, the deathly boring place I tend to avoid. Anyone who knows me at all probably suspects that that one corner of my brain is far overpowered by the emotional, mostly-if-not-completely irrational part. And they would be correct. It's so much easier to face difficult and painful truths once they've been diluted in some way. For me, it's through writing--fiction or non. It creates a barrier you don't get when forced to deal with things face-to-face with no warning or time for preparation. I need the time to figure out how I'm going to react, what's reasonable. Can I scream and cry and demand to be made the center of attention once more? Probably not. Can I accept that my irrational feelings of betrayal and replacement are inevitable and painful, but perfectly normal? Yeah, I think I can handle that.
And so I take a moment, call a friend, and let that vice-grip on my heart slowly begin to melt. "That's life," she says. And I know she's right. "Just be strong and brave, and show the world who you are. Because that's what matters." And then the three words. The words that get us into so many troubles in the first place. But also, miraculously, the only words that can get us back out.
"I love you."
