Tag / Fears

by Gibran Cruz

The Little Box Of Horrors I Keep

I have been revisiting old posts lately. In part I guess it is because they are still relevant; they still describe how I feel today. If they are still relevant, then it means that in some way, I haven’t been able to “fix myself” or maybe there are a lot of questions, doubts or fears.

Maybe this is the reason why I still keep my little box of horrors…

There is a box hidden inside the darkest corners of my mind. It will keep safe what we have, will keep our relationship from breaking apart. You see what I most fear is that time will change what we feel. So I go there once in while to put all my bad thoughts inside. Stored away in that dark space are all the doubts that I have. When the trust tries to go away I lock those thoughts inside that place. Jealousy and anger are there too, all part of a time bomb I’m scared it could explode soon. I’m trying to put away my expectations because not everyone will make the same efforts. Now as I watch from afar with a glass of wine in my hand as the only witness to my crimes…trying to keep my insecurities locked inside so my relationship can last. A final toast to everything inside:

For all the things you didn’t see. The messages, love letters and text you won’t get but I wrote them anyway, they got deleted before I could push send. All the things we won’t share; the thoughts, the words, calls, dates, special days. I’m honestly hoping you will care.
All the things you forgot, some promises you broke. The written pages, quotes collected, Pinterest boards created but you won’t get them. The social apps we couldn’t share, no reason now to be hiding out there.
Chances missed, opportunities not taken. Pictures never shown of things and places; a world we could’ve shared but we missed it. All we can still learn or teach the other. Now I wonder why we never take the time for it.
The heart shouldn’t know about distance. I don’t want to give up on all I’m  feeling, trying to keep it away and hidden because I am afraid of all of it fading.
For all the times I’ve tried. I learned the drill: get angry, argue, forgive and try, try, try. All the times I cried because I couldn’t say I wasn’t alright. I never want to make you angry because I care about details in our lives.
For the times I felt neglected. I’m tired of  repeating how to fix it. The secrets, the questions, the plans to build our forever. Because we should start now to make it simple later. every day I hope you understand and start making changes.
I will drink to that and more to come, because I decided to put it all in The Box.

Now that all is done I will leave a note on top of the box. It will serve as a reminder for next time I’m here, to decide if it’s worth it to hide my fears. Remember this was me trying to make this work while waiting for you to play along… “SHE OFFERED YOU THE WORLD HOPING YOU CHOSE HER INSTEAD”.

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by Gibran Cruz

In Love With The Idea Of Love

i hate loveWhen I first read what the character Rose Walker said in The Sandman (by Neil Gaiman) I couldn’t believe that it was describing exactly what I’ve always felt about love.  The truth is that I’ve always been scared of it. Maybe not scared about love… maybe what scares me is the possibility of it ending and dealing with what happens next.

Sounds funny because I went through it some time ago and the possibility of meeting someone and falling for them made me  want to remind myself that I couldn’t do it all over again.

The problem most of the time is that while there are some of us who fall in love “for real”, there are others who only fall in love with the idea of it. This happens a lot when you meet someone “online” or “long distance”. You put a lot of effort into getting to know this person only to realize that your effort is not being reciprocated. Instead, they fall in love with the idea of having someone to send a few messages, call once a few days and say how much they “love” and “miss” the other person. After a while, when the person gets tired of “playing relationship” or doesn’t get what he/she wants, they leave breaking the other person’s heart in the process. They never worked to build something real.

But can we break our own heart with ideas and false expectations? the answer is yes, we can. We fall in love with potential, with what it could be, with what if… that’s when we give them a piece of ourselves, taking a piece of our souls when they leave us. Love does take hostages. We stop being ourselves; if we are not careful we start living for someone else. That’s when and why we hate love sometimes, yet we crave it.

In spite of all risks we choose to love. Someone once told me that the heart has reasons that the mind doesn’t know. We are afraid to be hurt yes but we build our defenses with windows so we can see what’s out there and give us one more chance. Always one more. We are afraid of having to explains our relationships and reasons to others, how we met and where. Afraid of what to do if it ends cause it’s like the song 50 Ways To Say Goodbye by Train, trying to explain why the other person is not with us anymore or why it didn’t work and we end up feeling not only broken but stupid about it. In my opinion, we have the wrong mindset. We should worry about building something real with a person who has more than just ideas. In the end, knowing the difference between what you wish it was, what you think you have and what really is will save you a lot of heartache.

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by Gibran Cruz

Drowning In The Sea Of Life…

Part 1 – Part 2

There’s a song by Ricardo Arjona that describes falling out of love and a relationship dying/ending as a slow progressing illness. Kind of like what happened to my relationship. Listening to it makes me think about how all the signs were there but either we chose to ignore it or we thought we could work harder to make things better. I even remember a friend mentioning that if we missed a window of opportunity, the relationship would surely die. The thing is that no matter how much you think about it and see the signs, you try to do the impossible to save it.

The beginning of the end. In August 2017,  with the help of my Sis , I planned (and paid) my dream vacation with my S/O in Egypt. For reasons I will not detail here, we ended up canceling the trip 2 days before I was supposed to travel (December 2017). I was devastated but I tried to keep a positive attitude when we talked about it and made all the promises that I knew we wouldn’t keep. It was really hard to come to terms with what happened. In part because we had months to prepare for it and some of the reasons why we canceled could’ve been avoided or worked with if addressed on time (not 2 days before traveling) and the other part is because in a LDR a meeting can take months or even years to schedule due to different life events. In our case we waited for college and then army. Needless to say, it took us some time to get our relationship back on track after that blow.

The second time around. Fast forward to 2018 and me making plans again. I talked to both the airline and travel agency back when the trip was canceled and they both told me the same thing: the ticket was still on hold but in order to re schedule it, I would have to pay a fine. In August 2018, exactly one year later,  I called the travel agency to re schedule my trip to Egypt. I was surprised to discover that I didn’t have to pay a fine exactly, instead I had to pay the difference between what I paid back in 2017 (around $1376) and the value of the same trip at that moment (around $3200). I wasn’t prepared for that. I had saved more money to pay the fine and make extra arrangements but nowhere near the almost $2000 I had to come up with in like 3 days. That’s the amount of days I had to make it work 3 days.  I had enough money to cover a place to stay and all other expenses while traveling but not enough to include that amount and there was no way I could come up with all of it in 3 days. I talked to my S/O about all of it but I knew he was unable to help at the moment. 

Drowning in the sea of life. At that point in our relationship I have to admit that I was evaluating if trying again was the right choice. My S/O was convinced we could make it and didn’t want us to give up.  We thought we’ve seen the light at the end of the tunnel when he got a new job. That job put him away from home, in a shared bedroom without free days until after 30 days approximately and further away from each other as a couple. Our jobs, time difference, our lives… our relationship was slowly drowning. I remember his first days off we barely talked because his siblings were home for vacation. At this point, I knew there wasn’t enough interest in our relationship.  Text messages became repetitive, almost like copy paste. Conversations became superfluous. I guess I was just waiting for an imaginary lifeguard to throw me/us a lifebuoy. 

The end (December 3, 2018). Like i said at the beginning, it was all about seeing the signs, but doing the impossible to save it. In the end, I found the courage to ask an impossible question: When did our relationship ended? He never answered when but he agreed that our relationship ended and that we killed it. After that I had to ask the next impossible question: What do you want? his answer was clear. 

drowning

After everything is said and done you are left with more questions than answers. You are forced to think about how it all went down and ask yourself if there was something you could’ve done or should’ve done to change the outcome. Your answer will always be yes and you will torture yourself replaying all of the possible scenarios in your head because after all, you know what they say… pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. Maybe I will talk more about that later. 

gibypea3

 

 

by Gibran Cruz

Drowning In The Sea Of Life…

Part 1 – Part 2

There’s a song by Ricardo Arjona that describes falling out of love and a relationship dying/ending as a slow progressing illness. Kind of like what happened to my relationship. Listening to it makes me think about how all the signs were there but either we chose to ignore it or we thought we could work harder to make things better. I even remember a friend mentioning that if we missed a window of opportunity, the relationship would surely die. The thing is that no matter how much you think about it and see the signs, you try to do the impossible to save it.

The beginning of the end. In August 2017,  with the help of my Sis , I planned (and paid) my dream vacation with my S/O in Egypt. For reasons I will not detail here, we ended up canceling the trip 2 days before I was supposed to travel (December 2017). I was devastated but I tried to keep a positive attitude when we talked about it and made all the promises that I knew we wouldn’t keep. It was really hard to come to terms with what happened. In part because we had months to prepare for it and some of the reasons why we canceled could’ve been avoided or worked with if addressed on time (not 2 days before traveling) and the other part is because in a LDR a meeting can take months or even years to schedule due to different life events. In our case we waited for college and then army. Needless to say, it took us some time to get our relationship back on track after that blow.

The second time around. Fast forward to 2018 and me making plans again. I talked to both the airline and travel agency back when the trip was canceled and they both told me the same thing: the ticket was still on hold but in order to re schedule it, I would have to pay a fine. In August 2018, exactly one year later,  I called the travel agency to re schedule my trip to Egypt. I was surprised to discover that I didn’t have to pay a fine exactly, instead I had to pay the difference between what I paid back in 2017 (around $1376) and the value of the same trip at that moment (around $3200). I wasn’t prepared for that. I had saved more money to pay the fine and make extra arrangements but nowhere near the almost $2000 I had to come up with in like 3 days. That’s the amount of days I had to make it work 3 days.  I had enough money to cover a place to stay and all other expenses while traveling but not enough to include that amount and there was no way I could come up with all of it in 3 days. I talked to my S/O about all of it but I knew he was unable to help at the moment. 

Drowning in the sea of life. At that point in our relationship I have to admit that I was evaluating if trying again was the right choice. My S/O was convinced we could make it and didn’t want us to give up.  We thought we’ve seen the light at the end of the tunnel when he got a new job. That job put him away from home, in a shared bedroom without free days until after 30 days approximately and further away from each other as a couple. Our jobs, time difference, our lives… our relationship was slowly drowning. I remember his first days off we barely talked because his siblings were home for vacation. At this point, I knew there wasn’t enough interest in our relationship.  Text messages became repetitive, almost like copy paste. Conversations became superfluous. I guess I was just waiting for an imaginary lifeguard to throw me/us a lifebuoy. 

The end (December 3, 2018). Like i said at the beginning, it was all about seeing the signs, but doing the impossible to save it. In the end, I found the courage to ask an impossible question: When did our relationship ended? He never answered when but he agreed that our relationship ended and that we killed it. After that I had to ask the next impossible question: What do you want? his answer was clear. 

drowning

After everything is said and done you are left with more questions than answers. You are forced to think about how it all went down and ask yourself if there was something you could’ve done or should’ve done to change the outcome. Your answer will always be yes and you will torture yourself replaying all of the possible scenarios in your head because after all, you know what they say… pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. Maybe I will talk more about that later. 

gibypea3

 

 

by Gibran Cruz

To The One Who Has My Love (Love Letter #4)

Giving up it’s easy. Staying after a fight to try and fix what’s wrong… that’s the real test. It seems that I always find the best words when I’m at the verge of letting my anger get the best of me. Love letters are relationship savers after all… don’t forget to let the love flow out in words.


by Gibran Cruz

Maybe We Are All Made Of Stardust

Not everyone is meant to be great and go on adventures. Some people are only allowed to dream their wholes lives and maybe I’m one of those people who are not meant to wake up. Life is full of opportunities but they are not for me, maybe I’m supposed to help others to see where those opportunities are and grab them. Giving is in my nature. I do not love thinking in what I can get in return, but I do love expecting to build beautiful things that will last forever. 

People like me, we want to be the architect of someone else’s life, someone else’s dream. Not because I think they need me to design a life for them, but because I think they deserve the best they can get out of life. The life I feel I will never have. 

People like me think everyone we love is made of stardust and we see how they can be a shooting star… so we build them up and make them shine knowing we are allowed only to wish upon that star as we see them light up the sky if only for a second before they are gone from our lives. 

I’ve never felt I have a place where I belong. I don’t even think this world is made for people like me…but we sure try to make it perfect for someone else when we love them as much as I love. 

by Gibran Cruz

Stay

I know how it feels when you are tired. Not of life, but of your life. How it is, how it goes and how you know it will be the next morning, the one after and the one after that. So predictable that it actually hurts. To people that look at us from the outside it seems so easy to tell us detailed instructions on how to change our lives. It isn’t so easy to us, the ones actually living the life they say is so easy to change. Is not like we don’t try, is more like we have spent our whole life trying that it becomes a race without a finish line… There’s no way to win or to get to that finish line so we can finally look at our lives and say “we are here, we made it, this is what i wanted”.
I know how it feels when you want to disconnect yourself from the rest of the world and be yours for a few hours or a few days. Do your things, or maybe not doing anything at all. Those are the days I want to close all my social accounts and be mine for a few days. Watch some movies, read some books. Every time that happens it becomes a little harder to go back to share yourself with everyone else. We do because it is expected. We are adults. Maybe because there are people that misses us, or maybe there is someone we always miss.
There are times I’m scared that  I would never find the right words to make you stay when all that you want is be away for a while. Though sometimes late.. I know I have to say it… Stay. Stay because you are missed. Stay because you are loved. Stay because life goes on and it takes us more time to change.. But sometimes what we are doing is changing the life of someone else. Whatever you do… Know that there are people, like me, who want to tell you that we understand…That we can’t live without you… So please Stay.

gibypea3

by Gibran Cruz

Little Box Of Horrors

There is a box hidden inside the darkest corners of my mind. It keeps safe what we have, keeps our relationship from breaking apart. You see what I most fear is that time will change what we feel. So I go there once in while to put all my bad thoughts inside. Stored away in that dark space is the doubt that I have. When the trust tries to go away I lock those thoughts inside that place. Jealousy and anger are there too all part of a time bomb I’m scared it could explode soon. Now as I watch from afar with a glass of wine in my hand as the only witness to my crimes…trying to keep my insecurities locked inside so my relationship can last. A final toast to everything inside…

For all the things you didn’t see. The messages and text you won’t get but I wrote them anyway, they got deleted before I could push send. All the things we won’t share; the thoughts, the words, calls, dates, special days. I’m still wondering if you would care.
All the things you forgot, all the promises you broke. The written pages, quotes collected, Pinterest boards created but you didn’t get them. The social apps we couldn’t share, always an excuse to hide them somewhere.
Chances missed, opportunities not taken. Pictures never shown of things and places; a world we could’ve shared but we missed it. All we could learn or teach the other. Now I wonder why you never took the time for it.
The distance felt kept getting bigger. I was giving up on what I was feeling, trying to keep it away and hidden because I am afraid of all of it fading.
For all the times we tried. I learned the drill: fight, argue, forgive and try, try, try. All the times I cried because I couldn’t say I wasn’t alright.
For the times I felt neglected. The secrets, the questions, the plans forgotten forever.
I will drink to that and more to come, because I decided to put it all in The Box.

Now that all is done I will leave a note on top of the box. It will serve as a reminder for next time I’m here, to decide if it’s worth it to hide my fears. Remember this was me trying to make this work while wondering what you felt.. “SHE OFFERED YOU THE WORLD AND YOU CHOSED TO SAVE IT INSTEAD”.

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To read more about Fears  in LDRs and see the writing prompt that inspired this post, head to the LDRBN site. If you are in a LDR and want to be part of the experience, APPLY HERE. Don’t forget to mention my name  Gibran.

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