Hold My Halo and Pass the Wine

As I sit on his boat, miles from shore and surrounded by the endless blue of the Gulf, I’m overcome by the unsettling stillness of it all. While the boat is busy with a group of his friends fishing, enjoying the time together, and the excitement of the deep sea, I am caught in a quieter place. A place that tunes out all of the chaos and chatter around me. The water beneath me stretches down over a hundred feet — silent, dark, unknowable — and somehow it mirrors exactly how I feel inside. Peaceful on the surface, but underneath, a depth of emotion I can’t quite name. Fear. Doubt. A heaviness that won’t settle. A heartache that won’t heal. Out here, the water, while comforting at time, still holds no answers, only questions that echo the ones I keep asking myself.

As I gaze out at the horizon, I realize there’s nothing separating the water from the sky except the different shades of blue. Looking down into the water, I know it’s over 100 feet deep only because that’s what the equipment’s screen tells me. Beyond that, my thoughts are scattered, drifting in every direction.

The first question I ask myself—quietly, honestly—is the simplest: “How did I end up here?” It’s a question that echoes not just through the silence around me, but within every corner of my memory. As I begin to unravel the past five years, moments once buried begin to surface, sharp with clarity. And with them comes a painful realization: I was never his harbor, never the place he longed to return to. I was merely a dock—temporary, convenient—something he used to steady himself before sailing off toward something, or someone, else.

Well, the answer is simple, really—painfully simple. I fell in love with a man who, not long after, decided he no longer wanted to stay in the place we once shared. He left—768 miles away—and, for reasons I didn’t fully understand at the time, I followed as best I could. Again and again, I found myself drifting further from the life I had known, each move tugging me away from my own center. He would pull back just enough to remind me I still mattered, only to let go again when he decided he needed more from someone more convenient. But now, here I am. Sitting on a boat, adrift on the water—one of the few places he brings me that has always brought me peace.

But today, even this familiar comfort feels fragile. Out here, surrounded by endless sky and open sea, my mind starts to wander, unrestrained. The stillness magnifies everything. Where once there was calm, there is now a rising storm of thoughts I can’t quiet. I find myself caught in an invisible undertow—fighting back tears, wrestling with anger, and trying, against all reason, to protect the tiny ember of hope I still carry. It’s exhausting, this effort to believe in something better while standing knee-deep in the wreckage of what was. But somehow, I’m still trying.

The truth is, I don’t even know how I ended up here—not just physically, but emotionally. It’s all such a blur now, tangled in moments that should have been clear. I fell for a man who never seemed capable of choosing. Not between me and someone else—but between connection and solitude, between showing up and disappearing. One moment I was everything, the next I was just… there. And the most maddening part? I know I’m enough. I know what I bring to the table. But somehow, in his world, I’m treated like an option—never the choice.

There’s this quiet, burning anger inside me—growing every time he pulled me close just long enough to stop me from walking away. I was healing, slowly. Not gracefully, not perfectly—but I was trying. The days hurt less, the nights were getting quieter. Then he reached out, like he always does, and I—foolishly, hopefully—answered. And now I’m here again, questioning everything.

Why am I doing this to myself? Why do I keep holding out for him to finally see what’s right in front of him? I was almost okay. I had started to stitch myself back together. And then he yanked me back into his world with no thought to how far I’d come. It’s cruel—how he moves on so easily, able to slip that switch of emotion, while I’m stuck picking up the pieces he doesn’t even realize he shattered….again.

And the worst part? He told me—*told me—he considered getting back with his ex. The same woman who broke him. Who cheated on him, abandoned him, tore down his spirit, and left him alone in a hospital room when he needed someone the most. The same woman whose love came with conditions, ultimatums, and bruises—some seen, most not. And yet, she still gets a second look. A second thought. A visit. A maybe. Even in him seeking for the closure, that event was so painful for me. He sought closure while I am left still seeking mine. Closure I did not get in that January phone call. Closure I did not get at the graduation party. Closure I did not get when I learned he was seeing someone. I had accepted that I was, in fact, never going to get closure on us.

But I digress. Back to the topic at hand – It wasn’t even the fact that he entertained the idea—it was that he told me. As if I was supposed to applaud his honesty. As if transparency somehow erases the sting. It doesn’t. It sharpens it. I sat there, listening, pretending I wasn’t breaking all over again, that the slow downward spiral I felt wasn’t real. But it was. It is. Because how do you hear something like that and not question everything? How do you stay rooted when the ground you’re standing on is constantly shifting under the weight of someone else’s indecision?

I sit here on this boat, rocking with the rhythm of the water, and he’s here too. Laughing. Comfortable. Free. As if nothing in him is tangled. As if I haven’t been drowning in the space between what he says and what he does. I look at him and wonder—What is it that you want from me? But he won’t say. He never does. And maybe that’s the cruelest part. Because I’ve given him everything—patience, presence, love that cost me pieces of myself—and still, he keeps me just close enough not to lose me, but far enough never to truly have me.

And here I am, trying to be okay again. Trying not to scream into the wind or throw something into the sea just to feel like I’m releasing something. Trying not to cry because I promised myself I wouldn’t. Not this time. But the ache in my chest won’t quiet, and my hands are tired from holding onto hope that’s never been reciprocated.

I know I’m enough. I say it like a mantra, even when the part of me that’s cracked whispers otherwise. I know I deserved a love that chooses me without hesitation, without ghosts, without games. And still… I’m here. On this boat. With him. Hoping that maybe—maybe—this time will be different.

But deep down, I know better.

And that knowing is the heaviest thing of all. Heavy enough, I started to feel like the weight of it all was going to sink us, right where we were, shoving us down into the dark waters to be engulfed in my own misery.

To play with someone’s mind is one thing—but to do it out here, on the open water, where there’s no escape from the weight of it all? That’s something else entirely. I guess he trusts I won’t throw him overboard. Not because he thinks I’m incapable of that kind of fury, but because he knows I’d struggle to get the boat back to the dock alone. Maybe he thinks that makes him useful—indispensable, even. Maybe that gives him comfort. Power. The kind he’s always seemed to enjoy having over me.

But what he doesn’t see—or worse, what he refuses to—is the war going on inside me. How I sit here, breaking in complete silence while he laughs at something meaningless, unaware of how much I am holding in just to keep myself from screaming. He doesn’t see the depth of it, how this isn’t just love. It’s being in love with him—fully, hopelessly, painfully. Still. Always. He doesn’t understand that I don’t just care—I ache. And maybe he chooses not to see it, because facing it would mean taking responsibility. And he is just not in a place where he can do that.

He moves through the world like my heart isn’t in his hands. Like my love is background noise—something he’s grown so used to hearing, he’s learned how to tune it out. But I feel it in everything. In every breath I take beside him. In every second he avoids eye contact. In every goddamn moment he acts like this is normal—like I’m not sitting here quietly drowning while he floats along, enjoying the fishing, unaffected.

And maybe that’s the cruelest truth: not that he doesn’t feel the same, but that he knows I do—and he does nothing with it. Nothing except take what he wants, when he wants it, leaving me stranded in the wake of it all.

And maybe that’s just it — he needs to feel needed, while I ache to feel wanted. I gave so much of myself so freely, hoping it would be enough, only to receive just enough in return to keep me tethered — like a boat anchored loosely, drifting but never allowed to truly sail. I had started to heal, piecing myself back together in quiet moments and learning to live without the constant ache of not knowing where I stood. But just as the pain began to dull, he pulled me back in — reigniting the very hope I had fought so hard to extinguish. Now, out here surrounded by the endless blue of sea and sky, I feel how empty I’ve become trying to be full enough for both of us. He clings to me like a safety net, not a soulmate, giving his second chances to someone who once broke him, while offering me nothing but confusion, distance, and the cruel comfort of being needed but never truly chosen. And the cruelest part isn’t the silence, the inconsistency, or even the lies — it’s the quiet hope he allows me to keep alive, knowing he will never return it in kind. So here I sit, surrounded by one of the world’s most breathtaking places, yet inside I feel raw, unsettled, and painfully incomplete—because what I longed to give and receive remains out of reach. Beneath me, the water stretches deep and unknowable, hiding a restless storm just beneath the surface. That storm—like the truth between us—is vast, cold, and impossible to escape, quietly gathering strength as it churns beneath this fragile calm.