Marble 15

This was my 15th marble. My 15th week alone.... I took the picture on December 22... But I'm not actually posting it until June 18th... 

I left Christmas gifts for T and the girls in the beginning of December. it started a short exchange of emails between us. I was hoping it would. After so many months, I was certain that we had grown and moved on from the painful things that had caused our problems. I wasn't expecting to hear that he had moved on and had started seeing someone else only weeks after he left me. 

I was devastated.. Not so much because he and I wouldn't be getting back together, but by the fact that he had moved on so quickly. My self esteem was already so low- to know that I was SO easy to get over... That he hadn't even struggled, or thought about trying again or anything... He just left and actually, literally never looked back. My heart was broken. I really was completely unlovable and ugly and useless. 

Against my better judgement, I wrote him one last letter. I asked him to think about all we had shared. All we knew about each other and all the plans we had... I told him that if he was SURE that this new woman was 'the one', then, fine- don't answer me at all. I don't want to hear about it. But if there was even a tiny, small part of him that thought he might be making a mistake, then please to just have lunch with me, and let us have a chance to get to know each other again. 

I decided to give him a week to answer. Christmas was coming, and he had company in town. I decided that if he didn't answer in a week, I would assume he was completely done with me, and I would unfriend him and his friends on Facebook, and give up for real and completely. 

When I took this picture, I was waiting. It was all I could think about, all day, every day. Waiting and hoping that he would write. Thinking about how different I was, and how much I wanted to show him that I wasn't the needy, emotional mess I had been when he left... 

I wanted to take a picture that would help me remember what had been going on. I saw the girraffe in Audre's room and decided that would definetly make me remember. 

It was two days after Christmas, 2 days before I had planned to give up and unfriend everyone, so that I wouldn't have to be forced to watch him move on with his life and see him happy with someone else... I had already written a lettter to him- a very kind, loving letter that said that all I ever really wanted was for him to feel loved and be happy, and obviously he was... I was on my way into a meeting at work, when I got an alert on my phone... "T is in a relationship with J.D."... 

In all the time we were together, he wouldn't even post a pic of me on his page... He wouldn't change his relationship status.... He wouldn't even take off that he was married to her, even after he had moved out and we were dating... It was impossible to not take it as a purposeful  deliberate slap in the face... I wrote him an angry note, attached the nice note, and then unfriended him and everyone that I had met through him, so that I wouldn't have to see it anymore. 

I had just begun 21 days of being all alone... I only worked, and spent evenings with my cats... 

However, only a few days later, things happened that set a whole string of events in motion that changed everything...