Citizen journal: When breaking up, or getting dumped, is hard to do

There was a young woman on a cellphone in a cost-conscious restaurant where I dine when I stumbled into downtown Spokane at lunchtime.

A female companion was seated next to the woman on the phone and held her free hand as they sat in the booth across from me. The woman on the phone seemed distressed at getting some bad news.

She shut her eyes and said something into the phone.

Her voice quivered but I couldn’t tell if it was rage or sorrow. However, her volume did increase so that I clearly pick up her side of the conversation.

“Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

Pause.

“Cameron that’s not true and you know it.”

Tears began to flow down her cheeks.

This was more than a late valentine.

She spoke a few more sentences before Cameron apparently ended the conversation that had ended the relationship. I surmised the parting of the relationship from the conversation that the broken-hearted had with her comforting friend.

The young woman put the cellphone on the table and sobbed into her companions shoulder. She spoke some oaths regarding men that I could barely understand through the crying and sniffling of the jilted party. It was still possible to get the gist of her gripes. I sensed that we (mankind in the restrictive sense) were being pilloried, maybe justifiably.

She was making that painful transition. Not from love to non-love. That wouldn’t happen for a while.

She was transitioning from HAVING someone you love to NOT HAVING someone you love.

Cameron probably had made that transition sometime before that conversation. Having someone is not the same as having someone you love.

Most of us (male and female) have been on both ends of that conversation at least once in our lives. Even if you love the other person, sometimes there are reasons to end it. THERE ARE SOME DREAMS YOU SHOULD LIVE AND SOME THAT YOU SHOULD WAKE UP FROM.

And, unfortunately, there is also often a bit of truth to the old relationship aphorism “If it didn’t end badly, it would never end at all.”

But all that truth and wisdom didn’t provide a bit of comfort for the young woman in the restaurant crying on her friend’s shoulder. Somehow we all make it through it. Well, most of us.

I felt that this sad woman probably didn’t go home that afternoon to put on a pot of tea, then sit at the kitchen table and wallow in self-pity for long.

She was young and probably replaced Cameron with a better version in a week.

I finished eating and tried not to think about it.