What Tears Mean

"I'm not in love with you. I don't see us having a future together, like getting married or having a house." That may or may not be a direct quote but it is more or less exactly what he said. I always knew that it was coming but I wasn't near as prepared as I thought I would be. Numbness washed over me first and I couldn't even cry. It didn't even hurt. Not yet. My mind escaped itself for a while as I tried to move the words around in my head and make sense of them but for some reason no matter what I did, I was unable to put them in order. What brought me back in focus was the discussion of what that meant, and what that meant was that he was moving out of our two-bedroom apartment in the basement of the old junior high school. I found this place from an ad online. It was extremely spacious, and priced well in my range. I was 26 years old and this would be the first time that I moved out completely on my own, into my own place. I would find out later that I placed a tremendous amount of guilt on him and it is what drove him to pack his small bedroom at his parents house and leap into living with me. I can't recall the conversations that he says we had, but I believe him in most cases, as I have periods of time from my past where the memories are all gone. Huge chunks of life that either didn't register or have been suppressed and I can't find the trigger to launch them back to me.
We discussed that he would leave in the morning and go back to his parent's house. I know there was more to this talk but those words remain blanked in my head. The numbness subsided at some point because I can clearly remember lying awake on our worn mattress, staring at the flimsy tiles that lined the ceiling in our room. I could hear his slow, steady breathing to the right of me and feel the heat bouncing off of his skin. I remember looking at him while he was sleeping and thinking to myself that he feels nothing from this. His world has not been shaken, his heart was still a strong beating muscle pumping blood through his very alive veins. It sucked every ounce of strength out of me to look at him.
When morning came we moved about our normal routine as if nothing had happened at all. I even remember dragging my weighted legs to the bathroom to run a shower, hoping to wash the previous nights events off of me. Maybe what had happened the night before, him deciding that he was better off without me, was just another one of my nightmares that felt so real to me that I couldn't differentiate between my dreams and reality. The steam began to creep up through the space between the shower curtain rod and the ceiling and I heard the door click open behind me. I stepped into the shower and a moment later he followed. He held me under the piping hot water and it was the first time my tears would fall because of this loss. But it was far from the last time. As intimate as it was to be in that space together, I knew it was a way to let the goodbye sink into my open pores and nothing more. I cried continually for the rest of the morning. Not a loud, sobbing, short lived kind of cry, but the kind that burns way back before the tears surface in your eyeballs. The kind that constantly feeds your tear ducts so that they fall in a straight line all together like a stream. Oh, how it hurt. It ached and burned my chest like a shot of cheap whiskey at room temperature with no chaser. It made my stomach turn over like butterflies from a first kiss but that feeling tapered off to nausea that made my insides contract.
I climbed onto the kitchen counter as I often did, letting my heels bang against the cabinet below and I waited because I knew he was gathering his things and I was going to be seeing a back view of him in the upcoming moments. He settled his body against the counter, my knees grazing his ribs and placed his hands on the tops of my thighs. When our eyes finally locked, the tears that were pooling in his eyes made them look gorgeous like liquid amber and man, did it hurt like hell. I know in that moment, he was not losing tears because he was hurting, but rather because he knew he was hurting me. He may not have been in love with me, but he did love me, and he had always protected my heart until now. We didn't have to exchange any words. He knew that when he left I'd be on my knees, broken. I took a mental picture of him walking out of that door and reminded myself to file it away as the goodbye that would change everything for us. I think we both thought that the pain I was feeling from this separation would hover a few days at broken and then slowly dissipate as I came back to life. But we were wrong. That pain was nothing compared to the hurricane that was about to hit without warning and leave nothing but complete devastation in its wake.