New York --> Connecticut
Through all of this I felt myself drifting further and further from Sam. I lost my tramily and friends on trail so I had no one but Lionheart to talk to. I was so internally conflicted and I trusted him so I told him about the doubts I had about my relationship with my boyfriend. He stared at me and said, “Well obviously you have to break up with him.”
“I know,” I said. Things weren’t working, I wasn’t happy.
“You have to leave him because you’re in love with me.” I paused. I was shocked. I wasn’t but I didn’t know what to say. So I said nothing.
He was convinced that I loved him and he was overtly in love with me from then on but he was sensitive - capricious, and volatile. He was so vulnerable with me, in a way he said he had never been with anyone else. “I’ve never met anyone like you,” he always said. He was in awe of me and he didn't take me for granted like it felt my boyfriend Sam did.
I thought I had a choice. Lionheart and Sam were the two sides of a scale and each action tipped the scales one way or another. I was lost so I texted my best friend at the time, Bret, to get her advice.
I told her I was struggling with what to do. Sam had so many qualities Lionheart lacked but Lionheart had a lot of the qualities
I was missing so much. I wrote her, “He’s opening my eyes to all the things I’ve been missing in my relationship with Sam and I’ve been rationalizing telling myself I can do without them but I don’t want to have to.”
Bret was supportive and said “you’ll never know what you’re missing if you don’t give him a chance.” She was right. So I leaned in.
Lionhearts need for love was insatiable so I kept falling deeper and deeper into the hole I was digging, all the while thinking I was making a choice. His generosity implied some reciprocation and I needed him to help me catch my tramily by slack packing me. I thought I needed him so I gave him more - more time, more money, more love - but it was never enough. It was isolating. I grew distant from everyone.
He seemed so fragile, like if I didn't reciprocate his sentiments and actions that he would crack and who knows what would happen. I was afraid to find out and that fear controlled me but not on a conscious level - I had no idea how bad it was and how spellbound - possessed even, I was.
My boyfriend said I wasn’t myself and I was acting irrational but if he knew the peril I was in he would see that the lies I told him and the lies I told Lionheart and the lies I told myself were self preservation and survival. I was walking on eggshells.
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