I Love You and Good Bye

Lucas,

It was a destruction of my hopes and dreams for a family. It was you who changed the rules. It was you who said “I love you,” it was you who started talking about marriage and a life together. It was you who brought up the subject of kids and a family together. I never mentioned any of that first. But for the first time in my life someone was saying exactly what I wanted for hopes and dreams. You dropped the LMK bomb. You’re the one who changed the rules and how I viewed the relationship and the lengths I could expect us to go for each other.

I don’t understand why you walked away when you did. Why would you say all of that to me and then leave me. Yes I know you love him.  But you and he had a chance and he missed it. You were with me. Why put me aside and go back to someone who was unwilling to even tell you how he felt. He only told you because he could no longer have you. When you walked away I felt like you just gave up. As to the reasons why you did I don’t know. Would I like to know yes I would, all of it, as to why you left me.

I made myself a promise prior this year as I mobilized out of New Mexico. The promise was simple and very easy Lucas. It was made purely with both thought and emotion mixed in. I was single at the time and been for almost two months. Up to this point I had been dating four years with over 14 failed relationships. Most of which barely lasted close to three months. My first relationship with Keoki Halemano was, I think, what changed me into being the one who is willing to sacrifice everything for the other person I am with. Our relationship was online. He was in Iraq and I was in Albuquerque. I would sleep at night with the cell phone in hand and my computer logged into yahoo messenger. When he broke up with me, I was devastated is an understatement. And from then on all I found was people who filled the void, very poorly, of need to be needed. I was used, lied to, cheated on, and tossed away as if I never mattered.
Then when some major drama occurred with Patrick and Nick in November of 2010 I was done. I was so tired of the games and lies. I was so done having my hopes and dreams laughed at and mocked. Everything I wanted had always been a joke to people, because it was not fun. It didn’t help that it was not anything they ever wanted to be a part of. 

So I made myself the promise that I would go into one more relationship. Whenever that may be I would enter into it with no barriers and complete honesty as to what I wanted and who I was. I was not expecting a relationship over the coming year as it was a military deployment and all that it would entail on mobilization. Plus when I mobilized DADT was still in effect. So I was not willing to hide a relationship I was in any longer. The second part of that promise was that the next relationship would be the last one. If it failed I would never attempt or look for another one actively.

I had been talking to a guy, John, online for a few months starting in June. Nothing serious, we just talked about school, work, and that sort of stuff. Well when I went home on leave I had made arrangement to meet him Albuquerque to hang out club and get to know each other. When he flaked, I realized that once more I had been just an option.

So I hit absolute depression. I was so scared of being alone yet that’s all I could see for me. Lucas I was watching my friends’ graduate college and start families and kids. I had failed out of school. I blame me being a sheep and going to the parties and just letting other people dictate how I lived my life. All I have ever known is how to give, so I surrounded myself with people who only knew how to take. And they finely took my hopes and dreams; they even took away my desire to help people. I stopped being active in things I use to enjoy, to even include the fact that I stopped playing the violin.

As you can tell the depression I was in had been building up for so long Lucas. I wanted to suffer for everything. Things I had done and hadn’t done. For every pain in the world I needed to feel and suffer. How I got to that point I don’t know. I really don’t know. That is how I punish myself Lucas, by making sure that I suffer in the worst way possible. All of this is going on in my head and then the isolation from my family and any one I have ever become super close to and being fully able to confide in.

Then I was so tired of lying to my family and people that I did consider close friends. I had tried so hard to tell my family when I was home on leave but couldn’t bring myself to hurt them and disrupt the status quo. This added to the depression and the feeling of being alone Lucas. I felt that I was nobody to everyone. I felt I could wear the mask and it would never bother me because I could pretend to be F.I.N.E.

Enter the picture, you. Never before have had I had someone smile at me the way you did that first day. I fell in love with you then. When you lit up and talked about horses and riding and hiking. The joy and the smiles you gave my direction. There is a reason why I like to see you smile Lucas. It’s because you’re beautiful when you really smile. I love seeing you do that, particularly when it is aimed at me. I vowed to myself that first day I met you, on 14 September 2011 that I would do anything for your happiness, as long as I could continue to see you smile.

Lucas hearing you talk about the things you wanted and had planned for yourself was very much so inspiring for me. I wanted to better in my own life because I was around you. I started to care and I opened up to the people around me. They all saw the change in me Lucas, they all told me how they had missed seeing me really smile like that. I felt go and had a new direction for my life.

Then it came crashing down the 29th when you said good bye. I saw the future we had talked about with kids and the country dissolve into nothingness. It hurt so much. To have the one person I loved to tell me good bye. It was like being hit by a three mile freight train. Just when I had been given back my hopes and dreams for a family it was all ripped away. I am not sure I can ever forgive you for that Lucas. That pain runs so deep.

However on the flip side of that Lucas, I love you with all of my heart. I love you for everything else you have given me. You gave me back my compassion. My love for other thing my desire to do the things that I want and like to. You gave me back my writing, my music, and the desire to change how I viewed the world.

Lucas, I will always love you and nothing will ever change that. When I told you “Tu eres mi amor eterno” it was more than pretty words. It was my binding promise. So know this that no matter where you go or how much pain you bring my way I will always be there for you. Just the same as when you gave me the promise that if I needed you that you would not even stop at the red lights.

I know the chapter of “us” is over Lucas, it has not been an easy thing to come to terms with. Always I have had a hard time letting go of people that are important to me. So when on one of the nights that we walked and I asked you how to let go of someone you can’t let go of, you replied that you don’t. So I will hold on and love you till the stars burn out. I do not know if our paths will cross again in the future. All I can say is that I hope they do circle back around to each other someday.


With all of my love,
I will see you soon,
Bud Cordova