The Runner Phase: Ready, Set... Ignore!

  "Sorrow" by Tilly Williams @ Deviantart.com

        The first two weeks he was gone were not easy.  I did the best I could to stay strong and stable  He said it was his goal to get my son and I to California; he wasn’t happy with the way he’d seen my ex-husband treat me before he left.  We spent some time on the phone, we’d talk every few days.  At first, our very first conversation when he was in CA, he told me "I'm afraid to lose you."  Funny seeings as he ran pretty soon after that.  We shared very sweet conversations but I was scared.  I had to hide my fear from him.  The distance brought out all my insecurities about my loveability- if I wasn’t physically there to love him how could he remain in love with me?  Would no sex sit well with him?  He’d already told me that while he was a very sexual creature he only wanted me.  He would miss being with me, holding hands with me, spending time with me but it didn’t mean he’d need to turn to someone else.

            Some of my fear came from the fact that he’d ended a long-term relationship before moving back to the Midwest two years earlier.  I knew he was going to be back in the same area where they worked, lived and loved together and that knowledge did nothing to calm my nerves.  I’d mentioned her once and he said he had no reason to see her.  But he’d already asked about her because he informed me that no one at his job had seen her and he planned on avoiding the places where he knew she hung out.  I knew ghosts would come back to haunt him; their end was not a good one and even though he’d told me he was over both of his major heartbreaks I had a sneaky suspicion he wasn’t quite as over them as he’d have me think.

            Being a psycho girlfriend was nothing I was familiar with myself.  I have my hang-ups but they mostly deal with my own secret insecurities that I normally can keep to myself.   I have never “chased” a man, nor have I called tons of times in a row, or pushed myself on a man when I clearly knew he wasn’t interested in me.  I am definitely the opposite of stalker material. I know that not everyone is going to “like” me and it doesn’t mean there is necessarily anything wrong with me but that there simply was no chemistry and no soul connection, or else it’s a soul connection specifically to learn how to let go gracefully.  So whenever I’d see a woman doing that “psycho girlfriend” thing I wanted to just shake her while telling her to have some pride.

            I told him I missed his face and he took a picture of himself holding up a sign that read, “I love you Rose.”  Sweetest smile ever.  It is a precious shot of my love.  That night we were on the phone and he told me to be that butterfly my guidance had told me to be and come fly to California and be with him.  He said he made enough money with this new job that I wouldn’t have to work and I could be the author I was supposed to be.  I allowed my fear to speak for me as I said, “I’d have to work.  I’ve always taken care of myself.  What if I moved to California to be with you and you left me?”  Immediately I regretted saying something so harsh and doubtful but there was nothing I could do to take it back.  Here he was his normal sweet endearing self and I kicked him right in the heart.  Not my best moment. 

            I emailed him often, too often actually.  His contact did slow but rationally I knew it was because he’d started a new job, and he had to take some of his work from Chicago with him since he had to break his contract to take the job in California.  He also got sick a few days after his flight.  All conditions that should have told me to be a little more patient, and I tried but I allowed my fears to get the best of me.  I had gotten so used to hearing from him all the time and my ego didn’t like the slower contact.   I became doubtful and started freaking out a little bit although I did my best to hide it.  He was still calling me leaving me the sweetest voicemail messages {I have them all} and always always told me how much he loved me.  Joron was a generous sort with his “I love yous.”  He, like me, is a walking ball of love energy.

            None of us are perfect.  I got a little resentful of all the fun he was having in California with his old friends.  This is what happens when you place your joy all on one person and he leaves- it’s like he took my joy with him.  Classic co-dependence although I didn’t see it and I tried my best to keep my insecurity veiled.  I had a moment where I told him I was upset that I hadn’t been able to meet his mom or any of his friends while we dated.  I didn’t even see his home.  He’d only been to my house.  He did one night when he was here tell me, “I have to get you to my house soon and we’ll make dinner together” but he left before we could make that happen.  One night on the phone he told me the only thing he asked of me was to not be demanding of him.  I told him I wouldn't and then, oddly enough, the next time we spoke I brought it up and he didn’t remember saying it.  He said, “I asked you not to be demanding?  No I didn’t.”  I chalked it up to a mistake yet I should have taken it to heart anyway. 

A few nights later after noticing even slower contact I finally could not take it any longer.  I text him and told him I felt like I was being left out in the cold because he was not saying much to me.  He apologized profusely and said he planned on staying home the next night, Friday, to talk to me.  He asked me not to be mad and he would try harder.  That evening he went home and emailed me telling me he hated emailing from his phone and often didn’t have access at work so he’d been slow in answering my emails.  He told me he loved me, and the last line of his message was, “Just remember I love you and I want you to be my future.”  Still, even with his kind words and reassurances I woke early in the morning and felt compelled to tell him more how I felt, and I did.  I knew I was being a little passive aggressive but overall I was feeling… very insecure.  I missed him a lot, and the two weeks had not been easy.  My message was probably somewhat desperate sounding and not my normal nature.  I was sensitive to being pushed to the side and I wanted reassurance from him that this was not what was happening between us.  I was afraid to lose him.

The next morning he emailed me short and not at all sweet.  He was very upset with my message and told me he’d already felt terrible enough when I told him I felt he was slowing on his contact and that’s why he had apologized.  He said he didn’t need my guilt and wasn’t going to check his phone because he didn’t want any more guilt from me.  He also said he was planning to talk to me later that day but didn’t know if he would now.  When I got his message I hadn’t realized he would be that upset so I apologized.  I told him I was very sorry and would try harder to understand he was busy- I just had a weak moment from missing him.  I knew, though, that I’d upset him and I wasn’t happy about it.  I felt terrible, horrible.  And I did a stupid thing.  I went home feeling desperate and stupid and I drank whiskey with my sister, got drunk and fell asleep early.  When I woke in the middle of the night I saw that he’d text me that night.  “Not cool.  Not cool at all but I love you and wanted to talk to you tonight.  Are you there?”  Well no I wasn’t there.  I had given in to my number one vice, drinking, a habit I knew I had to nip in the bud before it became substance abuse. Here, dear reader, is where Truth begins.  I used drinking to escape reality, escape my fears.  It was a crutch and whiskey was my poison of choice.  Every spiritualist I met, even reiki practitioners and massage therapists who knew nothing about me medically, would ask me if I was a drinker and tell me I was not supposed to be drinking because Spirit was forever trying to help me avoid becoming an alcoholic at forty like my own mother did- at forty.  That night it caused me to miss out on talking to my love and, what I thought, I lost the opportunity to smooth out our rift.

I responded that I’d fallen asleep and hoped I’d catch him soon.  I told him again how sorry I was and that I’d calm down in the future.  Still very upset I couldn’t fall back to sleep, was feeling slightly hung over, so I brought out my journal and started writing.  And worrying.

And I continued to worry.  For days.  That text message was the last I heard from Joron for weeks.  He went from telling me “I still love you and wanted to talk to you” to gone.  G. O. N. E. Gone.  It is here where I will pause and try to ask you to comprehend the level of fear, doubt and terror I felt when I could not get this man, my love, to respond to me.  I text.  I emailed.  I called.  But I heard nothing… it was as if he just fell off the face of the earth.

And I wanted to die.  Just die.  My life was thrust into a terror state that no one can really understand if not walking in the same nightmarish shoes as me.  To experience heaven in a person and then have that person suddenly yanked away, to go from love to total and complete indifferent silence, was horrific- like a bad dream I could not wake from.  Sleeping and eating both came to a screeching halt.  I could not function at work.  I was in shock and, worst of all, my deepest darkest fears had come true.  I was being forgotten *snap* just like that.  It wasn't until later, until I read about the mirror effect, that I saw what was truly happening in my life: my soul was showing me what it felt like to face my fears.  My fears literally became human, manifested themselves through this man so I could face them just as if I was looking into a mirror.  I wasn’t perfect, got a little needy and clingy, and he just stopped talking to me.  We had no ending.  There was no goodbye.  Just silence.  I would call and it always went to voicemail.  I left sweet messages.  I told him I loved him and was feeling horrible and would he please just call me so we could talk?  I text him and asked if he would tell me he wanted it to be over so I would have some closure.  At the end of the one week mark I started freaking out and resorted to letting my fears kick into high gear.  I told him I couldn’t eat or sleep and needed something, anything.  If he ever loved me he would give me that… two words even, “Good bye.”

But no.  I got nothing.  I still have the stream of texts I sent him, and they break my heart because I was hitting not my first and definitely not my last rock bottom but rock bottom it was.  Loneliness, sadness and pain drip from every word of those text messages I sent him in the hopes that one of them, something, would get my love to respond to me.  I am the owner of a sincere and genuinely loving heart, and it was breaking.  Bad.  After about a solid week of trying to contact him I felt like “psycho girlfriend” so I stopped.  I convinced myself I was a horrible terrible person for the pushy desperate lonely message I’d sent him that thrust us into these circumstances and overall I just felt like shit.  Total and complete shit.  I wrote in my journal and begged God to please bring him back to me.  I said I was sorry.  I cried buckets and buckets of tears…and I began to doubt.

What if he wasn’t truly who I thought he was?   He told me that when he started working at the university they put him up in student housing for a while so he could look at buying a home.  I began to wonder if maybe he had a life back in California that he’d hidden from me.  I never saw his home or met anyone from his life.  What if, God forbid, he had a wife?   I started getting terribly paranoid, lost ten pounds, and was an overall wreck.  When this man stopped being in my life, stopped loving me, he proved to me that my worst most deadly fears were true.  Again I found myself shaking my fists at God and screaming when I was home alone, “See?!  See!  I knew I was right!  He was too good to be true!  I am not loveable!  I am easily forgotten!  I am not worthy to be a made a priority from afar!  You just want to hurt me!  Everyone who loves me leaves me.  Even my parents couldn’t love me.  My husband stopped loving me.  And now this man too- he just stopped loving me!  There is something wrong with me.  How can someone so wonderful and perfect, who showed me so much love and care, just stop loving me?  How can he forget about me?”  Yes- it was that same constant stream of consciousness for the first two weeks that he was gone.

I was, in a word, terrified.  I missed him with a horrid physical pain that felt like my heart had been carved out with a dull knife.  I came close to vomiting on occasion because I couldn’t eat yet I’d get nauseous from heart pain.  And I was trying to be a good mom.  A good mom.  Have you ever tried being a single mom, a working single mom at that, who only sees her son during the week at night when night time is the worst time for heartache?  It is like having the weight of the world on your shoulders and trying to keep your head above water while maintain a semblance of stability and happiness for a little one.  I was drowning.  I didn’t want to clean or think or… breathe.  I didn't want to live.  I told God, very spitefully and mean, that luckily I had a son because without him I’d kill myself.  No one else loved me, I’d never have anyone who would want to stay with me, and my son would only be little for a while, so it would be easier to just die.  But I couldn’t because little man needed me.  Someone needed me, so I was grounded here for the time being.  Fuck.

Somewhere in there my guidance got through to me and I was utterly furious.  I cried and sobbed and snotted and swore and acted like a banshee to this invisible entity that had been with me for years.  I was not a stranger to being taught through tough love but this was too much to handle, and I didn’t think I deserved it.  I was a good person so why was I being punished?  Me who hurts no one and tried to help all?  I buy my friends groceries when they are down on their luck.  I try to always do the right thing for others- yet here I was feeling like I was living a Hell on earth.  The pain and terror of having Joron fall off the face of the earth was enough to break me.  I told my guidance I no longer wanted to hear a word about being a “Powerful One” like I was always told.  I’d been guided for years that I was a strong loving old soul who God wanted to use to spread His love and messages.  My guidance told me I was love personified, a glowing ball of love energy put on earth to spread Love and Light.  And here I was longing to die, quite literally begging God to please just kill me.  The level of pain I felt far surpassed anything I’d known in the past, and after being abused until I was nineteen, dealing with two loveless and failed marriages, and loving and letting go of two married soul mates- I knew pain.  Pain and I were really good close pals but this was a level of suffering I hadn’t known existed until Joron just stopped talking to me like switching off a light switch.

The ignoring had begun.  Silence mode.  The Runner Phase. 

While melting down with my guidance I could feel a shift in the energy which always signals a moment to pay attention and I was told to listen.  I wanted to tell it to kiss my ass but I quieted and accepted the communication.  I was told, “Get ready for truth.  Write it down.  He is your twin soul.  Look it up.”  Twin soul?  I’d briefly heard the term before when researching soul mates.  Also I had been in New Orleans months earlier and browsed through a metaphysical magazine that had an article on twin souls and I’d read it.  It struck me… two very close souls who are connected throughout every life time.  I sniffed, blew my nose and through red aching eyes I googled and read about twin souls.

And I wanted to just die.  Right there in front of me on a website for twin souls, also known as twin flames, was every single aspect about my relationship with Joron as well as the nature of our strong and sometimes eerie connection.  The mind reading.  The knowing my dreams.  The fact that we resembled each other.  The intensely close magnetic attraction.  Usually twin souls have one major aspect of life that is in opposition, and here we were me a believer and he an Atheist.  Often the connection is so dramatically intense that it brings out all the deep emotional wounds in each person, and if there is much healing to be done it can be so volatile that one person will quickly be separated from the other, normally by hundreds of miles.  And, drum roll please, often one of the twins, usually it is the man, “runs” while the other, the woman, “chases.”  The runner will, out of nowhere, just shut down and refuse to budge.  He will go completely quiet and this throws the chaser, the woman, into a state of terror and fear that works to get her to hit rock bottom, or like me, become a useless quivering mess of a human being whose every fear about herself became a reality through being abandoned by of the love of her life.

I wanted to die- have I mentioned that already?  Good because this is where the energy is going to switch from desperation to truth.  It has been seven months since Joron left me and I have learned immense amounts of truth about how God, The Divine, uses us as instruments of Divine peace and healing.  There is a bit of Jesus, Love, in all of us.  One of the main ingredients in a twin soul union is Unconditional Love.  Christ Love.  The saying “The Lord works in mysterious ways” is never more evident than when it comes to the relationship between twin souls.  I will admit I have been very angry with this entity I used to think of as "God."  My feelings about The Divine have changed immensely throughout these last months without my twin soul in my life but despite my anger and pain the healing I've received has been incredible and I am thankful.  Not easy to say- "I am thankful" for being separated from the love of my life but it is a process and the process worked for me.  It is a process I will be explaining, about how the "ignoring" and silence is used as healing.  It is a healing that comes directly through The Divine and is orchestrated by soul.  The process feels like a dream, like you may be going crazy, but you are not.  I am not.  I am Awakening, shifting.  

Stick with me as I now begin to explain my own personal experience with "The Runner" and what I like to call "The Stayer" because I do not chase.  I am staying.  Staying in love.  Staying with God.  Staying with... trying to believe.  It's been a long seven months yet they've been transforming.

The last email my love sent to me before he "ran" he ended his message to me with the words, "Just remember I love you and I want you to be my future."  I firmly believe those were words written to me from his heart, and through Spirit.  His soul was letting me know, channeling through him, that utter and complete chaos was about to occur.  The cosmic shit was being prepared to hit the fan... but that he truly did love me, and wanted me as his future.  Healing needed to be done.  A process wanted to be known so it could be shared, and that is what I am here for: to share this intricate formula God uses to heal us through the love, pain and mission of being called to join together in twin soul union.