Two years. Twenty-four months. One-hundred and four weeks. Seven-hundred and thirty days. Seventeen thousand five-hundred and thirty-one hours. One-million fifty-one thousand eight-hundred and ninety-seven minutes. Sixty-three million and seventy-two thousand seconds.
That is when I entered a relationship with a con-man {or woman}. I never found out who it actually was. I don’t know if that’s what bothers me the most – the not knowing. I was young. I was foolish. I was vulnerable. I was all those things when I first entered into the ‘relationship’. If you can call it that.
I was a seventeen year old girl, who had recently suffered from heavy trauma and I was looking for someone – anyone – who could make me feel loved and worthy of something. You would think that I would have turned to my friends and family but I was simply too scared and too ashamed of what happened to tell anyone in my ‘real life’. So, I turned to the internet. It was a website that I found; a site dealing with teen pregnancy, adoption and loss. I thought I was safe on that website. I thought I had found people who understood me. We were going through the same thing after all. That was until a man called ‘Nero’ appeared on the conversation board. A boy on a teen pregnancy website? It certainly caught my attention, along with a lot of others. We began talking about anything and everything.
This is when the elaborate stories began. They started off as believable then they became suspicious. A year passed by. I began digging around in newspaper archives I found online. Essentially, I became my own private detective. I was now eighteen and we still hadn’t met, despite his ‘attempts’ of getting on a plane and coming over here. I was getting older, impatient and suspicious. The stories were crumbling at my feet. I was feeling disillusioned but still, I continued.
I think a small part of me knew that it was all a lie but I was just too emotionally invested to simply walk away. I searched every image ‘he’ sent me, except the ones of himself. I was too scared. I knew that if I searched his image I would find something I didn’t want to know. I pushed it to the back of my mind. I was busy; I had work, I was planning my college career and I was making new friends. He didn’t like that. We broke up. I think we were separated for almost three months before we got back together, properly.
Big mistake.
It was different this time; we fought constantly, we pushed each others buttons, we tried to ‘one-up’ each other all the time. This was not the same relationship I was used to. After months of fighting, I finally snapped and searched an image that he had sent me. It came up as the picture of an international model/movie actor. My world crumbled. I knew it was coming but that didn’t stop it from hurting. I had spent one and a half years of my life caught up in an elaborate lie.
Now, it’s almost six months on from finding out the truth and it still hurts me sometimes. At the end of the day it was me who got hurt. It was my feelings that were hurt. It was my head that got messed with. It was my heart that got twisted. It was all me. I’ve sat up – late into the night – thinking about what would push a person to do something like that and I have no answers. Unhappiness? Maybe. Boredom? Maybe. Malice? Maybe. A joke? Maybe. For whatever reason – the incident still haunts me and it probably will for a long time.
There’s just one thing that I can’t get over: a part of me is still waiting for him and that part would probably wait forever, if I let her. But I can’t. It’s time.
Two years is a long time. It’s time to let go.
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