Sunday morning, I was checking my email, and had an offline message from yahoo messenger. It was from someone I never thought I’d hear from again. It was from a man who broke my heart in such a cruel way. He was the first one I’d dated after my divorce. I fell for him hard and fast. I felt more compatible and attracted to him than anyone I’d ever met (at the time). We’d shared the depths of our hearts to each other. He’d spent time with my family, and Rosie adored him. I thought we were in love, and we started making plans for the future.

And one day…it was over. The email he sent said he never wanted to talk to me again. He didn’t respond to my emails. He didn’t have a cell phone. He moved out of his student apartment, and his roommates told me they were forbidden to give his new number.

A few weeks later, I tried emailing him again, asking if we could get together to talk. I needed to understand why he abandoned me so suddenly. He responded with “coming back to you would be like coming back into a nightmare.”

I was devastated. I was already emotional and vulnerable and had hardly started down the road to healing from my divorce, but all I could think about was him. I didn’t understand why things went wrong, when I had no inkling that he felt any differently than I did for him. I had never been more heartbroken from a breakup. *

(*Heartbreak from a divorce is a much different feeling. It’s more of a feeling of your family ripped apart and identity as a wife stripped away. Maybe I’ll blog about that one day)

So flash forward 5 years. I get a short apologetic message, saying he’s glad that I’ve found someone whose made me happy. And it’s true…I have a husband who adores me, and I’m very very happy with him. But hearing from Tim opened up a deep Pandora’s box of emotion that was buried long ago. From a current perspective, he’s not the person I could have seen myself with now. I don’t have any pictures of him, but I still remember clearly his face and features. I sent him back an email, but of course, he didn’t respond.

I wonder if the emotional rollercoaster his message put me on this week would have been better than never hearing from him at all.