Emptiness

This chapter describes the continued downward spiral of the situation.

As it turned out, God chose not to provide a positive answer to that prayer. J.C. still could not tell me what was wrong and what needed to be done to fix it. However, I feel like things could have gone way worse than they did. After all, we didn't wind up screaming at each other, we didn't break up...there was nothing big or dramatic like that.

 

I got in bed that night and texted him to thank him for letting me see him and saying that I had had fun and hoped that he had, too...also saying, of course, that I loved him. His response was, "I did, too, love you, too."

 

Throughout the next two months, things stayed pretty much the same. I would see him about once or twice a week, on average, and talk to him via texting about the same amount of times. Although I still brought it up from time to time, I got to the point where I tried to refrain from talking about our situation every single time he let me come over. I reasoned that maybe everybody else was right and that the best thing to do was just let him take the time he needed to figure everything out.

 

As much as I wanted to do that, it was incredibly difficult for me. I have my moments when I can be one of the most patient people in the world...but then again, even the most patient people in the world have their moments when they want to snap their fingers and have everything fall back into place without having to wait any longer.

 

By October, I had reached that point. On the morning of the 18th, I got up early and drove to the apartment, where I waited on the front steps until J.C. and Fuller came home from work. Naturally, they were shocked to see me--especially J.C., since I hadn't asked him anything about coming over and had never just shown up out of the blue like that.

 

I actually got a little bit farther on that day than I had on any other occasion during which I had attempted to figure out what the problem was in this situation. J.C. revealed to me that it wasn't our relationship that was making him unhappy, and it wasn't anything that I had done or said. The problem was simply that nothing made him happy anymore. A direct quote from him is, "The only time I'm happy is when I've got a beer in my hand."

 

I've forgotten quite a few things that have happened over the course of my relationship with J.C.--as I have stated several times throughout this story, there are many conversations that I am unable to recall exactly. However, the look in his eyes when he made that revelation to me on that morning is most definitely not something that can be classified as forgotten...and I honestly doubt that it will ever meet that criteria.

 

His eyes had always been so bright and full of life and possessed this lively little twinkle to them. In that moment, however, I saw nothing of that sort. What I did see was something that I had never seen before; something that I cannot describe with any other word other than just...emptiness.