Part 18: Gaston

 It's Sunday morning. March 15th, 2020. It's the first Sunday of the Covid shutdown and we keep getting more news of things being cancelled because of the pandemic. My parents still want us in our Sunday best and we're going to watch church over Zoom, but I can't stop thinking about my fight with Gaston from the night before. I text him good morning, he responds. I decide that it's time I address these problems that we've been having. I'm not dumb and I know that these issues can't keep going this way, so we need to fix them in order to live happily ever after. 

I text Gaston. I say something along the lines of, "I know we've been having a lot of issues and we've been fighting lately. I just wanted to check in and make sure that you still love me." His response hits me like a truck. "Yeah... We should talk about this in person." I mean this was a first, him wanting to talk about things in person. But this was not a good response. I start to spiral and he starts to make a million excuses about why we will never work out. He's going on a mission, we're so young, we don't know where school will take us, we don't connect anymore. Literally all of these reasons were true, but the thought of not being together was absolutely unbearable. His final text he sends says, "My mind is made up." 

I tell him that I am not letting him break up with me over text for a second time. I say that I'm leaving to come get him and he better be outside his house in fifteen minutes. My mom is in the kitchen prepping lunch when I walk up to her with tears in my eyes and say, "I have to leave. I think Gaston and I are breaking up." She hugs me but before she can say anything I grab the car keys and drive away. Gaston won't be free to talk to me for another hour but I cannot be in the house for one more second. I drive to a lookout point in Abbotsford. I sit in the car and cry hard. I knew my fate, and it is so painful to sit there and wait for it. I start to delete all the photos of Gaston and I off of my phone. I change my lock screen and delete all of our pictures off of social media. I text Manda, who is still at BYU and I tell her that Gaston and I are breaking up today. I'm not sure how sorry she actually is, but she is very sympathetic and kind. 

When I get to Gaston's house, he gets into the car and we drive in silence. We drive to a parking lot close by and park. I instantly burst into tears and weep, "Please don't leave me." All of the kindness, compassion, love and feeling that I have longed for over the past few months (but really the past three years) came to me in that car on that Sunday morning. He hugged me, held my hand, let me cry, let me yell for as long as I needed. He sat there while I told him that I was going to drive my car off of the road on my way home. I told him that there's no way I will ever be okay and that I can't do this without him. "You can." He says over and over again. He tells me that we aren't leaving this car until I tell him that I'm going to be okay. I cry so hard I can't breathe. I tell him that I would do anything to make this work and he says that it will never work. Then he hits me with the words that haunt me to this day. As my head is buried into his shoulder, he says, "I just don't love you anymore." 

I drop him off back at home. We don't kiss goodbye but he hugs me, looks back at me and says, "You are going to be fine." I watch him walk up the hill back into his house and think about how that's the last time I'm ever going to hug him. I picture the early days. That Valentine's Day where we confessed our love for each other. The laughs, the fights, the inside jokes. It was all gone in half an hour. This is a person who knows everything about me. I've told him things I've never told anyone. I've been vulnerable with him. Now we won't even be friends anymore or ever speak again. How do I go on?

When I'm driving home, I message my parents in a group chat and say, "It's over. I don't want to talk about it. I need all of the photos of him taken off of my bedroom wall by the time I get home." On my bedroom wall, I had a huge photo gallery of me with my friends and family. When I go downstairs, they had listened to my request and all of the photos of Gaston and I are down. In their place, are empty spaces in the gallery. There are so many empty spaces. I find it symbolic of all of the empty holes left in my life after such an integral part of it goes away. It makes me physically sick to see the gaps. I go upstairs to watch my comfort movie, "My Best Friend's Wedding" but it makes me sad. That's when I start to cry again. I can't stop. 

The next morning it still feels like a nightmare. I wake up early, with puffy red eyes and a sick stomach and a pounding headache. My dad is sitting on the couch and he's the first person I see when I wake up. "I'm so depressed." I say as I go get a Tylenol for my head. I reach out to a mutual friend of Gaston and I and ask her if she's heard anything. She hasn't so I break the news that we broke up. Gaston's friends always felt that he didn't treat me very well so I get the impression that they're mainly worried and sad for me. I'm worried and sad for me too. 

Rachel Fisher, a long time family friend of mine comes over and finds me with my head under a pillow. She has always been a constant in my life so I didn't mind that she was seeing me on one of the darkest days of my life. She offered to get me a pink drink with peach juice from Starbucks, and I will never say no to that, so I got up and we went. 

A week goes by after the break-up when Gaston texts me to ask how I'm doing. Holly thinks it's weird that he was texting me but I finally felt like I wasn't going to die. He tells me that he isn't doing very well and he's had a really rough week. I ask him if he has any regrets and he says no, just that it's a big adjustment. The only difference was that we didn't say good morning and goodnight, because we never talked during the day anyways. Our plans we made to go to that mall outside the city weren't going to happen. We weren't going to get married, we weren't even going to his prom together. He tells me that his mind is officially made up.

 Because I'm not here to ruin Gaston's life, I won't say in full what happened next in this conversation. He came clean about some things that happened while we were together, and they didn't make me very happy. "Why wouldn't you tell me?" I asked. "I was your girlfriend for three years." "Yeah, and I'm not perfect." he says. I pause, stare at my phone, take a deep breath and type, "That's for sure. Please don't contact me again."