There are different kinds of sadness. Sadness from losing a spouse, breaking up with a boyfriend, or saying goodbye to a friend. There are people who know from experience what you should do, articles telling you the stages that you will go though. But what happens when your sadness doesn’t belong to any group? What happens if it’s undefined? How are you supposed to feel? And are you even allowed to be sad?

“Was there even anything between us?” I had asked him.

I was not sure how to define this relationship. We were never together, but we had spent a good amount of time together. We hiked one time around Piha, I often went over to his place and we went grocery shopping.

He told me that he wanted to be with me. For 6 months, he continuously told me that I was “the one.” But we were never “together.” He was never my boyfriend. Just someone I opened my heart to.

So how are you supposed to feel when somebody you’d spent so much time with suddenly leaves? Somebody who was not your boyfriend? It felt like I wasn’t supposed to be sad because our relationship was not defined. Maybe he wanted it that way so that it would be easy for him to leave, so that he wouldn’t be doing anything bad.

Somewhere along the 6 month mark, he changed his mind, but never told me.

I called him up one night and asked him in a faint whisper, “Do you still like me?”

He wasn’t sure. He said something like, “I don’t want to be with you, but I still like you.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that you had stopped liking me?”

“I didn’t think it was that serious.”

And so I told him that we could remain friends if he could keep it neutral between us. I thought, better to be direct and set boundaries now, than not and regret it later.

But he never kept to that agreement.

And so after the 1 year mark I told him I didn’t want to be friends with him, and stopped all contact. Two weeks later, he texted me saying “I miss you.”

He did this a couple of times and at this point, I turned into a crazy, uncontrollable person, the details of which are too embarassing to share. I became the crazy person, the one people always say you should stay away from. And that made me feel so isolated in the process of my anger and sadness.

The hardest part has been replaying my part in this. Was I being too pushy? Or emotional? There are moments throughout the day where I have hated my actions, and as an extension, hated myself.

I don’t want to define the road forward. All I know is that I need to continue writing to make sense of the things that don’t make sense.

In the beginning, it was too hard for me to write about what happened, I was too caught up in the emotions so I was afraid I wouldn’t be honest with myself. I have been writing in bits and pieces, letting the truth come out slowly. I feel like I did everything right in the beginning, but even then everything turned wrong, and I am the one left reeling with this.

Emotions are something I need to balance. From time to time I feel guilty for letting my emotions ruin this thing between us. But then I think, what is a relationship without emotions?