Pain that Lasts - A Girl Trying to Move On - Part Seven

How could he do this to me? How could he leave me? We were in love. She lay in her bed, staring up at the ceiling. She felt like someone had reached inside her and taken hold of her heart. It felt like someone was squeezing that heart. Pinching it. Twisting it. They wouldn’t let go.

She rolled onto her side. She had never felt the kind of betrayal that she felt now. He had left her and she would never be the same.

What did I do wrong? Did I fail him in some way? She felt tears fall down her face and she ignored them. They had been falling off and on since she got the news. I must have done something wrong, otherwise he wouldn’t have chosen to leave.

A quiet knock came at her bedroom door, and she sat up on her bed as her dad moved into the room. He had concern written on his face as he approached her. “Sweetie…” He reached out and wiped her tears with his thumb.

“How could he leave me?” She whispered, falling into his arms as he knelt beside the bed. “How could he just go away? How could he be so selfish?”

“I don’t know, sweetie. I don’t know.” Her dad held her close, his hand running up and down her back. “If I could take your pain…”

She swallowed hard. Her dad didn’t know how close she had been with her boyfriend. If he knew, he wouldn’t be acting as comforting as he was now. She had done things with her boyfriend that he never would have approved of, and now her boyfriend was gone.

“I don’t know what made him make the decision that he did, sweetie,” her dad said softly. “But I do know that he messed up. He had a beautiful girl like you loving him, and he chose to leave that behind.”

“He chose to die,” she whispered. “Why would he choose to die? Did he know that it would hurt me like it does? Did he know, and he still did it?”

“Sweetie, I don’t think he was thinking about you when he made his decision,” her dad said. “He needed help, and he didn’t get that.”

“I wish that he would have told someone, that he would have gotten the help that could have saved him.” She closed her eyes, her body resting against her dad’s. She wanted to turn back time. She wanted to help her boyfriend. She would give anything to be there for him, to stop him from giving up on life.

She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. She had to believe that her boyfriend hadn’t known the kind of pain that he would cause in dying. She had to believe that if she was going to go on. He had loved her. He wouldn’t cause this amount of pain knowlingly. He cared about her too much to do that.

By Emily Acker, author of No Longer Broken

Scroll through the blog to find the earlier parts of the story, or find Part One of the story here and work your way through it from the beginning.