November 1, 1997

Journal entry:

Dear H,

This has been a turbulent time.  Turbulence I wasn't expecting.   Did you realize you had so much power?  You will never know how much I love you unless you think back to when you last loved me that much.  I hope you will someday.  I'll always cherish the love we had and bitter sweet memories I carry with me.  I hope in time they will become only sweet memories for me.

Loosing you is painful. I see you slipping away, slowly, slowly.  So frustrating ... nothing I do is right.  It seems such a slow, agonizing, tortuous, middle ages sort of procedure to endure.  A clean, honest break would be so much easier.  You told me once men are not very nice when they break up with a woman.  They get vicious and vindictive during breakups.  Why?  I don't understand that either.  It's a part of you I have not seen even a glimpse of in all the years I have known you.

The pain is like someone very slowly clawing through my chest cavity and stomach.  There is no knife involved, only nails and bare hands and brute force.  Instead of killing me instantly by ripping my insides out - its a slow, and deliberately planned chain of events, beginning with my entrails, tugging and pinching at them slowly and surely, forcing me into a locked position by the wrenching and constant pain you are causing me while you empty my guts before our very eyes.  All the time I continue to love you because I have trusted you completely for more than 18 years and I know in my heart that down deep you still love me.  At any moment, I am absolutely convinced you will realize how much you are hurting me, and at that moment you will of course enfold me in you arms and rush me to the hospital for emergency surgery.  But it never happens.  You simply keep on pulling, tugging, clawing and ripping while I drip droplets of blood and slowly bleed to death.  I'm dieing in front of you H, and somehow you are so shut down you don't even know.  I honestly never knew this kind of emotional pain was possible.  I remember when we first fell in love -- all that magic!!  I didn't know that existed either.  I remember attempting to write about it, to put my feelings on paper, but there were no words in the English language for that much love.  Now there doesn't seem to be enough words for this much pain.  Will you ever, ever understand, H?  Will you?  Ever?