I don't own anything that has any relation to ER (unfortunately, I could use the money).
Remember, people, be aware of assumptions. That being said, here is chapter 3 of "Heartbreak: My Story."
Enjoy, and review if you find it at all necessary.
Natalie
We've all been told that pain fades and that time can heal all wounds—we've been taught that no matter the feeling, no matter what dreams may come—feelings will fade. Eventually.
But my feelings never faded. In fact, quite the opposite seemed to be true. My feelings grew with each passing day—with every day that I was blessed enough to see her at work, though I knew my time with her would be limited.
Sometimes, though, I felt ashamed of my feelings. I can't lie about it now; after all, it doesn't much matter anymore now what I felt then. Shame was not something I was accustomed to feeling in the slightest—but when I would think of her and smile, when I would think of her and instantly become happy, I felt ashamed. I was fantasizing about a married woman—and there was no part that was right about that.
Except for my love.
My love justified everything in my mind—everything I did, everything I said, and everything I didn't say. I never spoke up because I loved seeing her happy, I loved seeing her smile—I loved seeing her period. And if I were to tell her the dreams of our future that plagued me at night and haunted me during the day—I might be deprived of any of those things.
I know, I know, I seem like a martyr. And in a way, I suppose, that's how I saw myself for a very long time.
My words, my presence, my feelings could have ruined it all. And that's why I kept quiet the way that I did. I could bear to risk making her unhappy in the slightest.
And so I dreamt in silence, and wished in silence—and loved in silence.
And so I didn't see it coming that cold Friday evening in October when she showed up at MY doorstep, saying she had nowhere else to go—no other friends in the city. And I was shocked to see the tears in her eyes because I'd never seen her cry.
I, of course, invited her in, and she complied—she looked so distraught, and I felt a familiar pain in my chest as I watched her sit on my couch with her head in her hands. I asked her what was wrong—and my question brought more tears.
I tried to comfort her, I held her awkwardly in my arms—wanting so much to take the obvious pain away, but not knowing how.
Finally, her tears subsided, as my shushing and gentle strokes to her head helped to calm her down. I had never seen her like this before, and I knew that I never ever wanted to again.
She finally looked at me through tear stained eyes and said the words that baffle and anger me so much to this day.
She told me that Jim had cheated on her.
I was taken aback, that was the last thing I had expected to hear. I immediately felt anger take over my body—and I struggled to control it as I clenched my teeth and my fists in unison. I asked her if she was sure, if it wasn't some misunderstanding.
To which she replied that she'd caught him 'red-handed.' Just the mere thought of her walking in to him with someone else—the man she loved, the man she thought loved her—made me hurt inside.
What an ass this guy was. And I told her so—that did nothing to abate her feelings. I told her he didn't deserve her. He didn't. He didn't deserve an ounce of anything she had to offer. Not one single ounce of it.
I hated him. As wrong as it may have been I hated him with a burning passion. What's more: I wanted to hurt him. Almost more than I'd wanted to hurt anyone ever.
But I didn't. I held back, I somehow stopped myself from hunting him down and beating the crap out of him. Seeing her like that, so broken—I still, to this day, have no idea how I managed to control myself.
She finally fell asleep on my couch and I covered her with a blanket, and sat in the chair adjacent to the couch. For some odd reason, I felt as though I had to protect her—that I had to be right there with her to calm her should she begin to fall apart again. It's silly, I know—but I didn't leave that chair all night. And I didn't sleep save for fifteen minutes here and there when my eyes refused to stay open.
When she woke up the next morning, Saturday, her eyes were puffy and swollen from crying. But she still looked beautiful to me. I made her coffee and scrambled eggs—that's the way she told me she liked her eggs—and I listened to her talk as though nothing had happened, though I saw a different story conveyed in her eyes.
Finally, she could hold it back no longer—and she burst into tears again, saying that she thought he loved her, and that they were going to start a family. I had never felt as helpless as I did then.
There was nothing I could say to ease her pain, nothing I could say that would make it better. So I held her, and I wiped away her tears, and I tried to make things okay.
She stayed at my place for a few days, before she got everything sorted out in her head, and legally. She wasted no time and filed for divorce—she wasn't the type that could stand a man cheating on her. No woman should have to settle for that, least of all, her.
So Jim moved out—he got half, she got half, and that was that. We never heard from him again, and on the rare occasion that his name was brought up by some fluke accident or some idiot at the hospital, the subject was quickly changed, and then forgotten.
She seemingly bounced back rather quickly—she later confessed that things had been falling apart for quite some time, and that she had found a way to cope.
I told her that if she needed to talk, I would be there. And she thanked me and said that she knew that I always had been. Then she told me that she loved me.
Unfortunately, I knew what she meant.
I loved her, too. I always had.
The only way that I showed it was to be there for her during her many midnight calls—during her tearful visits at one in the morning. She was such a strong woman on every front, but sometimes she needed to break down—and I was going to be damned if I wasn't there to help build her back up.
And so though her marriage with Jim had ended—and there were no current men in her life, I still kept my feelings, my hopes, my desires to myself. Because I knew that now was not the time.
I wasn't even sure that there would be a time—sometimes that mattered so much that it hurt. But on the nights when we laughed together, I didn't care one bit about a time for love, because with her, everyday was a time for love.
Every single second of every minute of every day of every month was a time for love, even if it was only in my head.
TBC
