The Thing I Thought I Hated

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George Strait came on the radio, and I had to pull over.

I was driving down 290, heading toward Dripping Springs. The sun was setting. The sky was that particular shade of pink that only happens in Texas; the kind that makes you feel like you’re inside a painting. My windows were down. Gus was in the passenger seat, his head hanging out, his ears flapping in the wind.

“I Cross My Heart” started playing. The opening notes, that steel guitar. George’s voice was warm and sure.

“Our love is unconditional, we knew it from the start…”

I pulled over. Not because I was crying. I wasn’t crying. I pulled over because I needed to sit with something. A memory, a ghost from the past. A thing I’d thought I’d buried.

I turned off the engine, the silence was sudden, the air heavy and hot. Gus looked over from the passenger seat, ears tilted in quiet confusion. Staring at the dashboard while the song kept playing, I didn’t bother turning it off or down. I just sat there; fingers locked tight around the leather of the steering wheel.

Suddenly, I was back in 2012, sitting in the passenger seat of his beat-up Honda Civic, the windshield cracked across the corner like a jagged spiderweb, the CD player skipping every time we hit a pothole. He was driving us to his parents’ house, wearing a faded Texas Longhorns T-shirt that smelled faintly of Old Spice knockoffs, cheap cologne, and the cigarettes he smoked when he thought I wasn’t looking.

He had burned a mix CD for me, writing “For Savannah” across the surface in a hurried stroke of Sharpie, the black ink smudged where his thumb had brushed it before it dried. The opening track was George Strait. He told me it was the most romantic song he knew.

I remembered thinking, “This is it. This is what love is supposed to feel like.”

He played that song for me the night we got back together. The night we promised we’d do it differently.

I don’t remember what we did differently.

Promises… that’s the thing about it. They sound good in the moment. You say them, and you mean them, and you believe them. Then life happens, and you forget. You get busy. You get comfortable. You get lazy. You stop trying. You start taking each other for granted.

I think about that very night we got back together: the way he looked at me, the way I felt, wanted, seen, chosen. I think about the hope, and ultimately, it was hope that undid me, not the betrayal or the breakup that followed. Not the phone call at 2 AM.

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The hope.

The hope that he’d changed. The hope that this time would be different.

The hope that I’d finally found someone who could hold me without making me feel too big.

He played that song, and I let myself believe.

Hope is a dangerous thing. It is beautiful, and it is necessary, and it will also break your heart into pieces so small you will never find them all.

Kintsugi? Maybe. Or maybe just learning how to live in the quiet rooms left behind. Not everything is worth restoring.

Sitting in the car, I listened as the song reached its midpoint. My hands were still gripping the steering wheel, knuckles white against the warm leather.

George kept singing. He always kept singing. George does not care about a broken heart. He does not know I exist. George is just a man with a guitar, doing his job.

I remembered the night he told me he’d slept with someone else. It was a Wednesday. I remember that. A Wednesday. Who sleeps with someone else on a Wednesday? He couldn’t even wait for the weekend.

Awake for hours in the dark, I had already been feeling the shift. The distance. The quiet erosion of something I had been trying to hold together. When the phone finally rang, hearing his voice was only confirmation. I knew before he said a single word. I knew it right down in my bones.

He told me he was sorry. He told me it didn’t mean anything. He told me he still loved me. He told me he’d do anything to make it right.

He said, “I don’t want to lose you.”

And I said: “You already did.”

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Hanging up, I slid down to the floor of the apartment, pressing my back against the cold wall because it was the only thing solid enough to hold me up. I was wearing his college T-shirt, the one with the faded logo that still smelled faintly of him. I pulled it off and threw it across the room. Sitting there in the dark, jaw locked against the rising pressure behind my eyes, I told myself I was too tough for this. I told myself I would show him.

I didn’t show him anything. I just sat there, in the dark, holding myself, waiting for the sun to come up.

The sun came up. It always does. The sun doesn’t care if you slept. It doesn’t care if you’re broken. It comes up anyway.

Three years later, somewhere between a second apartment move, a new job, and a string of wrong people, I found the Tiffany box tucked away in a drawer I did not remember opening.

Inside, the silver heart tag was heavily tarnished, the dark engraving barely visible beneath the film of time. Holding it in my palm, it felt impossibly small and bitterly cold.

I used to think objects held onto the weight of what we felt for them, but there was nothing left in the metal: just cold silver and an old question about whether I had turned the dial down on everything. I placed the necklace back in the box, closed the drawer, and did not think about it again for ten years.

Ten years later, George Strait filled the air with digitized clarity.

I sat in the car and gave myself permission to remember. Not the anger, or the hatred, or the walls stacked up to keep everything out. I let myself look straight at the hope. It was buried down deeper than everything else, and it still hurt to touch, but it was also the exact thing I had sworn off forever.

I came to realize that hatred was just armor. That hope was the wound.

[Heading Toward Dripping Springs as the Sky Fades | moneycatzzz.com]

I hated him then. Or at least, that is what I told myself over and over. I convinced myself he had ruined me, that he had taken something I could never get back, and that I would build walls so high no one would ever touch me like that again.

Except the person I was frantically protecting was never him. It was me. And I was doing a terrible job of it.

I had molded that hatred into a cage. It was small and dark and safe, and I had lived in it for years, swearing the bars were there to keep the world out. But walls do not protect you. They trap you inside, as Tom Clancy puts it: “the bodyguard becomes the warden.”

The thing I thought I hated was never hatred at all. It was grief. And grief is not something you get over. It is something you learn how to carry.

The song ended. I was still sitting there in the driveway, hands locked onto the steering wheel, while Gus sat beside me with his head tilted, wondering what had taken me so far away.

The horizon was almost gone, the sky darkening while the air turned sharp and cool. I rolled the window down and let the wind hit my face.

As I headed toward Dripping Springs, the ghosts of 2012 faded out like an old calendar page.

The anger no longer carried any weight or worth. Neither did the sharp edge of the sadness. There was only a quiet kind of reckoning with the years that had slipped past, leaving two strangers behind where a history used to be.

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I do not know if Ruben remembers that song, or if he even remembers me at all. I doubt he ever thinks about the night he finally opened up to me. I think he just moved on the way people do when nothing is holding them back: quickly, cleanly, and without ever looking over his shoulder.

I pulled into the driveway and killed the engine, sitting there in the sudden quiet while Gus waited beside me. I reached into the center console and took a sip from the YETI Rambler. The water was warm, a little flat, and completely necessary.

I thought about all the things I thought I hated. I thought about the heavy instructions we spend our lives collecting: how to rise after a fall, how to pick yourself up, how to stay strong and steady against the current.

Maybe the real work isn’t fighting any of it. Maybe we just need to stop, hold the messy moments for what they are, take the good with the bad, and keep moving forward anyway.

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