Eight Months Later

It's been eight months since I met you and you've been gone for six of them. I want so badly to move on from you and move on from what we had so briefly but I cannot. My heart will not allow me to.

Why did you do what you did to me? Why did you lie? Why did you let me fall so deep only to leave me there, alone? What did you get out of this?

Sam, I am still trying to understand why you chose me to do this to. I am still trying to understand if you truly cared for me like you said you did. Everything points in the direction that you did not, because you left so quickly with zero attachment to me.

Give me my heart back, please.

***

I've been trying to find a way to cope with what has happened to me. I've spent hours with professional psychologists, trying to unpack the emotional baggage I carry with me; trying to lift this emotional trauma off of my shoulders.

I have always found writing to be therapeutic, so that is what I have chosen to do in order to begin to come to my own terms with this heartbreak.

It's funny, really - I have said that I am "beginning to heal" from this for months and months now. But when I found myself crying last night yet again, it seemed that the process had not even started.

This story is not the typical year(s), or month(s) long breakup story. No, it is a quick and very brief encounter with someone. But for whatever reason, I cannot seem to move past it. And since everyone I know is in a committed and healthy relationship, I have no one else to tell. So, I have chosen this platform to do so. If you choose to read this, and if you have been through something like this, thank you and please connect with me. I cannot do this alone any longer.

Now, let's start at the beginning.

***

I met Sam on the popular dating (or hookup) app, Tinder in late-September of 2015. I had just moved to Vancouver, British Columbia for my post-grad and since I was living alone, I was using the app to connect with people, and hopefully start dating again. I'd spent the summer living at home with my parents for the first time since I was eighteen and I had a job I hated in a town I hated equally as much. I reconnected with an ex and then complicated my emotional life even more by meeting up with another guy who completed messed with my feelings and used me for temporary entertainment.

I feel I need to give a bit of background of my personal life for you to really understand the true significance of Sam in this context.

To date, I have never been in a healthy, balanced relationship. I have never been in a relationship longer than five months. I have never fallen in love with any of my boyfriends, as they all had this issue with what I want to do for a career. I want to work with professional athletes; I have had a passion for sport since I was five years old and am pursed undergraduate study in sport management and am now beginning my post-grad career in sport and exercise psychology.

My professional life is that of perfection - I love my graduate program and I always exceed my own expectations with my academic potential.

But personally, it is a disaster. When someone asks me about it, the best way to describe it is this: I have never been anyone's first choice, ever.

I am a woman who loves sports - wouldn't you think men would absolutely LOVE this? Well, believe it or not, this is not true. I find that men are intimidated by me and it never gets past one date with someone I am truly interested in. But as people say "they always come back", this definitely rings true in my life. Currently, I have two males that I went out with and was completely into. However, they never wanted to connect on a romantic level. They now both have girlfriends and text me often saying how much this miss me and how they wish I was their girl because I am "the best".

Men have the tendency to take me off of what I call "The Shelf" when they see fit. The Shelf is what I define as the friendzone; in my case, the cool girl who I can drink beer with and watch the game. But since I am a female and they are a male and apparently males and females cannot be "just friends" nowadays, they love to take me off of The Shelf and bring me out of the friendzone into the potential girlfriend zone whenever they see fit. It really fucks with your feelings.

So I am always left sitting on The Shelf at the end of the day, and each guy who meets me takes me off every once in a while when he's lonely - even when he has someone else. I am never, ever the first choice of a man I want to be with.

So when Sam and I began talking, I placed myself on The Shelf with him, assuming he would do the same. He was from New Zealand, was 6'2", had a slick accent and I could not remember a time he was not smiling. When I met him for out first date and looked at him the first time, I was not attracted to him.

It took about an hour and I could not keep my eyes off of him.

He was a gentleman on our first date; held the door for me, paid for dinner, gave me his jacket when we left for a walk outside in the cool evening. He made me laugh so much on our first date and I could not get enough of his company. We laid on my bed and talked well into the early hours of the morning, and I asked him to stay with me that night. He told me about his family back home, his experience at University in New Zealand, his love for rugby, and all of the places he'd travelled to in Canada since arriving in December of 2014. He held me the entire night and I woke up to a kiss on the forehead the following morning.

I tried not to get excited or ahead of myself - I still knew very little about him, but he made a hell of a first impression.

Little did I know, everything he'd told me on that first date was a lie. And he was hiding an even bigger lie: two months from the first date we'd met, he would be on a flight back to New Zealand, leaving me back in Vancouver to cope with the biggest heartbreak of my entire life.