Isaac (part 19)

The benefit of being a man is that you get to have a really bad memory. Isaac barely remembers conversations we had yesterday, while I remember every embarassing incident in my whole life in such minute detail that I get embarrassed all over again when I remember it.

Although, since having kids I can no longer remember what I went to the grocery store to buy, or why I opened the refrigerator door.

But it's a good bet that chocolate answers both those questions.

If I ask Isaac today why he broke up with me 10 years ago, he really doesn't remember. It had something to do with me graduating.

And really, that's about as much as I understood when he broke up with me.

It was sudden, and oh-so-unexpected. It was March or April of my senior year. I had agreed to be part of an intern program with my college pastor after graduating, and was starting a new Christian fellowship at a university in Orange County. I also decided to get my Master's Degree while I was there, since we really needed a student to participate in starting the group. Isaac had one more year of school, then had to go to Rhode Island for training, and after that we didn't know where he'd be.

And somehow in his mind this translated to us taking separate paths in life.

It was absolutely shocking to me. We had known since before we started dating that we wouldn't be getting married any time soon, and that he would be going into the Navy right after graduation. I was only moving 50 miles away from him. Granted, in Southern California traffic that is more like 200 miles, but still, I couldn't wrap my brain around the concept that the person I thought I was going to marry had changed his mind.

And until that day I never understood that a broken heart isn't a figurative description, that your chest can actually hurt, you can feel like you can't breathe, that you are drowning in a sea of pain and don't know how to get out. For months I would beg God to just let me get over Isaac, because no other guy I met or knew or who asked me out after that compared to him.

About four or five months after we had broken up, Isaac asked me to go to dinner with him so we could talk. We still attended the same church, so we'd seen each other fairly regularly.

He wanted to get back together.

And I told him no.