the story of Rye part 5 the end for now

Part 5 the final part for now

I had been thinking about earthquakes all day. I’m not claiming psychic powers by any means, but that day I was thinking about earthquakes. Actually I was wishing for an earthquake. It is a common fantasy for me, when things start going really bad in my life, or I’m just unhappy with where I am, I imagine an earthquake that destroys my home, and everything I know. I fantasize about being a hero and saving lives, about mourning the deaths of those I couldn’t save, but most importantly starting completely and utterly over from scratch, having no food no money no life at all and having to build it all up from the bottom again. Of course it’s not something I would actually wish for, but when things start going wrong, it’s just what my mind goes to.
May 12th 2008 I came home to my mom telling me about the earthquake in China. I was surprised. My first reaction was not all that bad, China is huge, about the size of the US. I thought it was rather unlikely that it had effected people I knew. But I did jump on the computer right away to check it out.
It took me a moment to find out that it had been a massive earthquake. It was rated a 7.9 and had been felt across almost the whole country. A second later I found the epicenter had been right in the center of rural Sichuan. Sichuan, the capitol of which was Chengdu, which is where Rye lived, and where I had spent so much time.
I started franticly searching for news stories. I turned on all my messengers and wrote an e-mail to Rye, I tried calling her but the phones weren’t working, though that was normal. I was terrified. I tried everything in my power to get in contact with her. And every moment I waited I was looking up and learning more things about the quake, like how the epicenter had been in Sichuan, but they had felt it in Beijing. that’s like having an earthquake in LA and feeling it in Ohio. The stories of how many people were being found dead under piles of rubble that used to be apartments were growing. And I began to be convinced that Rye was dead. And then for the first time in 5 months, for the first time since I had heard about Rye cheating on me. I finally started to cry. I cried about everything that had happened, I cried because I knew even though I hated her, and even though she had hurt me so much, I still loved her. No matter what happened I couldn’t stop that.
I don’t remember where my parents were then, I can’t remember if they were watching me cry or if they noticed at all. I did it quietly to myself, just let my tears start pouring down over my cheeks. I had lost so much already. And now I thought I had lost it all.
Finally though as my head was leaning against my desk, I heard MSN alert me to a new message. It was Rye, and I was suddenly so relieved. I immediately started asking if she was ok, if her parents were ok, I asked about all the other people I knew in Sichuan, asked if she knew about them.
She told me the earthquake had hit while she was at home. She said she thought6 she was going to die because it was shaking so hard. They were getting after shocks regularly. And every time one hit she thought it was going to be another big quake, her and her family were scared to death they would not live much longer. They wouldn’t be sleeping in their apartment anymore, they had built a shelter out in a local park.
For the next few days I would hear horror stories about how every time some alert would come about another earthquake, they would jump in their car to get away, though they didn’t know where they were going. And there never was another earthquake, though the after shocks kept coming for over a month. All her friends were ok, and her family was fine. But everyone was terrified.
The epicenter was right near the Wolong Panda Reserve, a place I had gone to 3 times with Rye, we would later find a few of the pandas had died. I also found out that the town at Qingchen Shan, the town at the bottom of the mountain we had climbed had been leveled. And most of the buildings on the mountain had been destroyed. I still don’t know, but have little hope for the fate of the little hotel perched so dangerously on stilts hanging over the cliff where me and Rye had our first kiss, and have no way of knowing what happened to the family that lived there.
Me and Rye started talking regularly again. Mostly we talked about the earthquake, I was still so worried about her and her family, but as worry dissipated, eventually we came back to old topics, and in time the pain started flowing back into me. I of course found out she was talking the Australian guy still, probably more than she was talking to me. She was still making her plans to go to Holland, she had her visa and all her papers ready, she was just waiting for the time when she would go. In the 3 months I had been planning my trip to move to Holland, I had looked up everything I could about surviving in Europe with no money. Camping spots, where to get money, where I could sleep for free, I was going to invest in a tent and sleeping bag and all the things I would need to survive there. So even when I decided not to go, I felt at least that I would know a bit about the place she was going because of all the research I had done.
But as we started to fight again, and I started feeling all that old pain reforming. I decided it was still too soon, I told her I couldn’t talk to her for a while longer, I wasn’t ready to be her friend yet. I was working at a camp that summer, and so I figured I could just spend the next 3 months away from her, and when I got back I might feel better.
A week or two before camp started though we started talking online again every once in a while. This was tense, but fine. She was just a few weeks away from going off to Holland, and I was happy to be going to camp. I was still in a lot of pain pretty much all the time, but I at least felt like things were going to be ok. I made plans to not check my e-mail for the next 5 or 6 weeks, at which point we had a mid summer break and I would go home for 4 days.
Camp was great for me. It didn’t quite take my mind off things but it kept me busy at least, so I just kept working even though I would have liked to just sit and wallow quite a few times. It wasn’t perfect though. Sometimes when we had our weekend break, and I didn’t have any people around me, I would end up in a tree house, usually end up screaming kicking and punching the trees with as much force as I could. I had a lot of pain still in me, a lot of anger that wasn’t going away.
After the 5 weeks though I came home for my break. It was the 4th of July and I was happy to be home, though more happy that it was only a short time, I liked being on my own out in the woods more. As per my decision I only then finally checked my e-mail and turned on my computer. I opened MSN and there was Rye online. And next to her name, where it said her status were just the words “Brisbane Brisbane Brisbane” now immediately I was a bit worried, a little confused. As far as I knew she had left for Holland a week or two after I had gone to camp. I said hi, and after a long wait she said hi back. I asked her where she was and she said “guess” and I said I was pretty sure she was in Holland but why does her thing say Brisbane? It took her a lot of time where she said a lot of things that weren’t answers before she finally told me that in fact she was not in Holland, in fact she was in Australia at that moment. It seemed in 2 weeks she had suddenly made the decision to cancel her long held plans to go to Holland, and instead enrolled in a school in Australia. In a city very near to that son of a bitch boy. I kept thinking that I had learned the last truth, that there wasn’t going to be any more of these horrible surprises. But every time there was something new. There was some new item she would tell me that would send me right back to the beginning of this whole episode. My heart had been crushed, and then healed slightly, then shot, then stepped on then run through a paper shredder. Of course I immediately started shouting at her in type. I was so angry again. I couldn’t stand how she kept doing this to me, how she kept hurting me over and over. How could she be so down right mean? I mean cruelly horribly mean, like she didn’t care how much she hurt me, like it didn’t matter to her at all?
Before I returned to camp, I sent her one more angry e-mail. A long cruel angry destructive e-mail because I just wanted her to feel as bad as I did. The rest of camp was less good. At one point I punched a large saw blade in front of the kids though I don’t think anyone saw me. It busted up my hand pretty bad and they were afraid I had broken it though it turned out to be ok. I spent more time on the weekends alone, more time sulking. I could believe my life had turned this way. I couldn’t believe I was the one going through all this pain. The thing about having your heart broken is that you live entirely in clichés. Everything you do is exactly the same as every break up song, and every emo poem you’ve ever read, and suddenly you understand that lots of people have gone through the same thing, but you didn’t realize that it was this, that this is what they were talking about, how this is how bad it felt.
To have the person you loved and trusted more than anyone in the world, come at you with a knife, and just cut you over and over and over, not caring that it hurts you, just doing it. To have the person you taught you what the meaning of love really was, turn around and tell you they don’t love you anymore.
I was suicidal at that time, not while I was at camp, but during the events, earlier, I had thought from time to time about just ending everything. It was a very very dark time for me. I lost some friends because of how dark I got. I hurt the people around me.
When I got home from camp, there was a response to my angry e-mail waiting for me. She told me that I was manipulative, that I was cruel. And she said she didn’t want me to write her any more e-mails. After all this time though, after all this anger I finally realized that I could never move on as long as I was still talking with her. I sent her an e-mail telling her I agreed, we shouldn’t talk to each other anymore, I said I was sorry for the monstrous things I’d said in the last half year. I said I was sorry that this is how love had to end.
She sent back this e-mail “Tian yi you don't need to worry about anything. I don't hate you and never will. whenever I think back, it's all the happiness I shared with you.. I know you dont mean for what you did and said after our breakup. You are not angry or bad person, i know who you are and I always believe you for who you are. I hope you well and there's something between you and me is eternal for me. I am happy that your the first person I ever loved. Yun”
I always hated how she could make me love her more, while twisting the knife.
that was the last I’ve heard from her. I haven’t talked with her since august of 2008.
Right now, I am still very hurt. I hate the lessons that I’ve learned, that I learned against my will, the things I believe now that I never wanted to believe and that I hate my self for thinking, that love cannot conquer the world, that I cannot trust anyone, that the world is not magical like I thought it was, instead it’s just plain, an average place where horrible things can happen everyday. I hate that I don’t think I could ever love someone again, at the level I loved her, and that I will always compare everything I feel in the future to the love I had for her. I will never feel safe again giving my heart to someone and so I don’t know if I ever will.
I believe I am suffering from PTSD now. If I see a picture of her, or hear something about her, my heart starts to beat so hard I think I’m going to have a heart attack. I’ve stopped crying again for the most part, though any time I see something about the earthquake again the tears start flowing. I don’t know what will happen to me, the worst part now is I’ve lost a great deal of hope. I feel like I experienced the most wonderful thing of my life, and I don’t know if I’ll ever feel that again. Life these days feels so dull and boring. Even exciting things don’t excite me like they used to. I just feel terrified a lot of the time, and I hate when fear controls me, but now it does. Now I am under the finger of fear, and it tells me what to do and where to go. It tells me what I can’t do.
Most importantly this story never ended, there was no conclusion. I don’t know what will happen, I don’t know if I will ever see her again. It’s hard to believe I could go my whole life and never see her again. She was everything to me, there was a whole year, over 12 months that I thought I would be with her for the rest of my life. How can you just say goodbye to someone like that? I don’t know what’s going to happen to me now. I think I’m on my way up. I am slowly getting better. The bad days are getting fewer and fewer, I’m not as depressed as I used to be. I am, one step at a time, moving back to a regular life. But at the moment I feel like the man who fought the dragon and lost. What happens to those people? Are there any stories about them?