Loss
- The Split Prayer
- Sep 27
- 5 min read
Going all the way back to the first handwritten letter, I remember the feeling behind it. I remember the night leading up to it. You had been busy. We had been talking steadily, and then one night you just couldn’t talk.
I got scared.
Scared that I had let you in again and that the loss I had felt before was right around the corner.
The loss I feel when you leave is like no other. It leaves me with a sense of emptiness I’ve never felt before. It’s always been that way, from the first time I met you. Granted, we didn’t start off on the right foot all those years ago—mistakes were made. But along the way, as we reconnected so many times, I don’t know why I didn’t do something about it in the past. Maybe I felt like I wasn’t deserving. Maybe the culprit is that we never truly got to know each other.
What I can tell you is that even when I didn’t know you like I do now, that feeling of loss haunted me. Every time you go, it gets worse. The emptiness gets worse. The gut punch gets worse. Each time, my heart sinks deeper into the pit of my stomach.
It’s a loss I can’t explain in any other terms than that it’s tied to you. I would never say completely caused by you—but associated with you, always.
In the past, I never shed tears over it. It hurt, but never tears. As time has gone on, looking back, I see so clearly that you are the one.
The love I was made for.
That is worth crying over. In fact, it’s worth more than that—it’s worth sobbing over. And I have done plenty of that.
I know you. I know you well enough to know you just thought to yourself that you aren't worthy of all this. Not worth crying over. Not worth this kind of love. But, you are. You are so worthy of this and so much more.
The loss and emptiness I feel is compounded by the sadness of knowing I was too late. That we were too late. Knowing now that something could have been done much earlier. Knowing what we could have been. Wondering how, or if, I’ll ever be as happy as I was when we were in the middle of it.
Because in the middle of it, I was so happy. Truly in love. Fulfilled.
Parts and pieces of me I didn’t even know existed—or things I thought I had lost so long ago—began to appear. You drew them out of me. Then, slowly, no matter how tightly I tried to grip, piece by piece of you slipped through my fingers like grains of sand, again.
I sit here now emotionally raw, empty-handed, and wondering about my future.
I’ve said before, “I don’t know how to come back from this.” The truth is just that: I don’t.
I don’t know how to go home and face my wife day after day knowing who my one is. I don’t know how to keep putting more and more energy into something that has never given me the love I felt from you—the understanding, the care. I received ten times more of that from you in the last five months than I have in eight years.
But the idea of splitting my family up compounds the loss I feel. I’m doing my best at the “fair shot.” I truly am. But I know I’ll never be happy. I haven’t ever been truly happy with her, but I have tried so damn hard.
And yet if I were to go home today and say “divorce me,” I would still be losing what little she and I have built. And that too is a loss.
The biggest one is the kids. When she brought up divorce the first time and I said I agreed, she said she would move back to Tucson. I don’t know how that works legally, but the idea of only seeing my son on weekends because he’d be in school in Tucson is terrifying.
The idea of that loss would kill me. I couldn’t do it.
Again, I don’t know how that works. I don’t know if I could fight her to stay here. I don’t know anything about this—but it’s truly scary.
These are just pieces of loss I’m working through as I navigate this situation I’ve found myself in.
There are many facets to the loss and hurt I feel. Underneath it all is a certain desperation and a misguided hope that you’ll come back. I know this is misguided. I’m working through it. Eventually, I know I’ll find ways to heal.
Maybe God will help the pain to stop, like I’ve asked Him so many times—to heal my broken heart.
This may just be my cross to bear.
I don’t know what His plan is. I just know I continue to ask for it.
If you aren’t my plan, then help me not to think of you. Help me to heal.
If my wife is the plan, then help me to love her better. Help her to do the same for me.
I still continually pray for you and for him. I pray for you consistently—always asking that you’re happy, safe, and that your marriage is turning into something special. I ask God to protect you if things were to ever get really bad.
Your last message said you intended never to disappear again and that you were sorry you hurt me. I know you didn’t mean to. And I know you are sorry.
I promise you, all is forgiven.
At one point you accused me of being too accommodating. Maybe I am. But that’s truly all I know how to do for you—twisting myself to fit the mold of whatever you need at any given time. To make sure you feel the love I have for you. I would twist myself into anything if it made you happy.
If I needed to stand up for myself, I could. But at this point, I don’t have a leg to stand on.
Sobbing, writing these letters, and God have been the only ways I know how to process this hurt. Some of it self-inflicted, some of it from you.
I know that through this loss there must be something better on the other side. I’m just not sure how to get there right now. But I know I will, one way or another.
I know now what it means to love and be loved. I have to keep working toward that.
It’s the only thing that would make this pain and loss make sense.
I know as time goes on, things will get easier. I also know as time goes on, I’ll find things to fill me back up and take the place of the emptiness inside.
But I also know there will always be a hole in me that is perfectly shaped to fit you.
A piece gone, just your size, that I gave away in all this.
That is a loss I may have to live with forever.
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