i can't let go

"If I hang on to this heartache, then my soul will not be free. So I keep trying..."

Four months and eight days after her realization and nothing had really changed for Shannon. Except the crushing truth that was her life. The constant replaying of relationships since she was sixteen years old. She could see the missed opportunities, the doors she'd closed, and a few hearts she was pretty sure she'd broken. She realized that she had been blind. And now she was lost, a grown woman with the relationship experience of a child.

Shannon continued to prepare dinner for Evan while she stewed over her predicament. From the outside, things were going well. Her friends had even commented on her new outlook on love, her newly found eagerness to date and to look forward to the possibility of commitment. It was a lot of bravado, more of how she hoped to soon feel rather than how she really felt now. The last few weeks dating Evan had been nice. She smiled even now just thinking about his dark brown eyes and sweet, sweet lips. Shannon wasn't delusional and knew things weren't supposed to be perfect, but she also didn't think it should be this hard this early on.

And she was pretty sure it was all her. Her mood swings, from frantic happiness to raging doubt to sobbing in tears, were hard to separate from Evan since they were mostly caused by him. Even she couldn't predict how she would react to the things he said and did, things that were mostly neutral but that she spun into her own craziness. Shannon could look back, logically find the point where she had gone too far, but she couldn't seem to stop it as it was happening. As though her emotions she'd finally let surface were in control and, worse than that, in overdrive.

But mostly Shannon was concerned because she knew. Her talk and her actions covered up an ugly truth that she could no longer bury. The moments that had broken her, that had trapped her in this fear and pessimism and unwillingness to hope were constantly on her mind. She used to ignore them but if she wanted to get past this, she couldn't any longer. She wanted to let them go but she couldn't. The moments were as raw and painful as they were when they happened. The tears and frustration and anger were fresh each time and it felt like her heart was being shredded every time she thought of them.

It was those moments keeping her from Evan. Those moments causing her wild mood swings. Those moments leaving her unsure what was the right thing to do at any given moment of time. She was still afraid, afraid of repeating the past, afraid of being exposed as an unhealed fraud. Those moments had passed and she'd never dealt with them emotionally, just buried it. Now it was all surfacing and she wasn't sure how to even start to let that kind of deep-seated pain go.

The doorbell rang and Shannon wiped the tears from her eyes. No, she wasn't sure where to start or if she would ever be able to let it all go. But the alternative of not trying seemed ridiculous. So Shannon opened to door to once again try to let Evan in.