A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

That picture still burns in my mind. That beautiful day before heading to the beach, a quick check of my Facebook made me second guess everything I had been feeling. Only three days before, he had called to tell me he still loved me, he wanted to get back together. I thought it was a lapse in judgment, a normal breakdown that came a few months after our break up. It wouldn’t be until that following summer that I would find out my answer pained him in a way I never thought I could. “No” was all I had the courage to tell him, for if I let my heard truly speak, I was afraid of what it’d say.

It was only a few short days later that he had his arm hung around a pretty girl’s neck, smiles upon their two faces that I not so secretly wished I could wipe away. I was in a state of shock the moment I saw those pictures on Facebook, and when I returned to them hours later, it finally hit me. He was moving on from a relationship he had wanted back merely three days before. It was unbelievable to me, because for three years, I had him wrapped around my finger – longing for me – and one word had changed his mind.

A month went by, we didn’t speak. His birthday came and went, I wished him my best. But then came my worst. A friend who attended his birthday celebration thought she’d make me feel better by slyly snapping a picture of his new girl on her phone and send it to me with a caption that read, “She’s so trashy, she wears a bump-it.”
Sitting at the Loft, at a table with friends, surrounded by strangers, my tears uncontrollably began to fall. I didn’t want to believe he was happy spending his day with her – thoughts raced through my head about their relationship, their intimacy, their secrets. I had never been more jealous. I had never been more vulnerable.

Hours later, as my friends tried to drown my emotions in Pinot Grigio, I wondered why I was still in so much pain while he was happy. The only answer I could come up with – he was able to move on while I was stuck there wanting something that was no longer mine. My attempts to find someone new were few and far between, and I made a discovery that day that each individual’s ability to move on had its own pace, and I hadn’t truly begun my journey. I was still at the starting line because I was holding onto something that I couldn’t get the nerve to let go of, maybe because I knew he was exactly what I wanted. Nevertheless, it took me accepting the fact that he was someone else’s to be able to finally begin my healing process.

--Jackie DiBiase