Broken Love Story

My hopes, my dreams—eve

My hopes, my dreams—everything got buried the day we lowered her casket into the ground. I went through the motions, pretending I was okay when inside, I was empty. I was hollow; it was gone. My heart was still beating, my breath was still coming, but I wasn’t there.

I had a mini breakdown seven or eight months ago because I thought he was cheating. I looked for the signs, even looked in his phone when he was sleeping, but didn’t find anything.

“We’ve been married twelve years. We have girls.”

“Well,” Elliot now talks, “he lied to her, so I don’t really think it’s all her fault.”

...the kitchen quietly as I listen to them talk. “He used his middle name and told them he was an orphan.”

Defeated is a word that you use so many times not really understanding what can actually defeat you. I know now, my husband dying, him cheating on me, my kids without a father, my dreams of growing old with him gone. Beaten straight down to my core, straight down to my bones.

“She is more broken than Hailey is,” Crystal whispers. “Hailey can forget about him, but she will never be able to move on.”

I’m jealous of the love he had for her. Jealous that no one ever loved me so fiercely. Not once.

He loved her,” I say with a sob. “Loving me made him but loving her completed him.”

“I gave him everything,” she says, grabbing my shirt in her tiny hand. “I gave up everything for him,” she says quietly so as not to wake the girls. “My dream job,” she says as her sobs soften and her breathing hiccups.

“That I was just okay, but Hailey was the one who completed him.”

Of course, I went and fell in love with a broken man who could never love me back.