Then, than damned night it happened.
After that first heart attack, no others followed. There were a few episodes, a lot of them to be honest: fainting, racing heart, cardiac arrhythmia, but nothing so serious that it was beyond control. Nothing that my family and I weren’t used to by now.
It wasn’t like the first time, that had been a warning, an arrhythmia. But when it happened when I was with Conor, he went completely out of his mind because he had never seen me in that state before.
Conor and I had come pretty close to making love more than once. We spoke about the possibility of sexual intimacy with my doctor and he didn’t have any objections about it. But for me, it was the first time and maybe there was more to handle than I had anticipated.
That night something went wrong. All I remember was that I woke up in the hospital with my mother at my side. There was no sign of Conor. After I got back home, he came back to me and I let him do so, but he didn’t have the courage to touch me, or to really be with me.
It all became: ‘Are you alright?’, ‘Can I leave you alone tonight?’, ‘Do you feel like…’ and everything finished.
I was no longer a woman to be with as an equal partner, but a person to take care of. And I already had a family for that.
It seems like I can’t be loved without someone feeling the need to take care of me, or treating me like I could break in any moment.
I can’t love someone, or to explain it better, I can’t take on board all that love offers, because I know that someone could suffer from it as a result. I find myself acting the role of the weak, fragile woman who needs to be taken care of while someone else feels obliged to wait for the sudden bad news, and with this realization I feel as if it would be slowly destroying his life.
I can’t allow myself to suffer for love because my heart couldn’t bear it, certainly not, especially if it were with Jason. Especially if I had to see that devastating pain in his eyes every day, that ever-present fear of losing everything.
I can’t love him and I can’t have him around me.
I’ve lost everything.
I’ve lost my life and I’ve lost him.
