The Dirt Field

It’s been a week and I survived.

When everything fell apart, there were honestly moments when I didn’t want to survive. I didn’t want to have to live with the pain until it finally passed, and felt hugely overwhelmed by the work of dismantling a life on one side of the country and restarting on the other side. The last thing you want to think about when your heart is obliterated and pounding through your veins like broken glass is “I hope there are enough boxes in the building’s recycling bin for me to pack up my kitchen.”

(There was definitely a moment when I climbed halfway into one of those huge rolling dumpsters to grab the last empty box at the bottom. I can laugh about this now.)

In the past week, I’ve ended my life in Seattle and moved-cross country, settled into my room at Chez Bayer, and spent roughly 98% of my waking moments thinking about everything. What happened, why, how, what signs I missed, what red flags I ignored, how I could be so wrong about a person, what I could have done differently, how somebody I thought loved me could act that way.

It would be nice to stop thinking about it. I’m ready for a bout of amnesia, a little Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But my head doesn’t work that way – I’m that one final crow picking away at the long dead and desiccated animal carcass on the side of the road. I have to understand and process endlessly until everything feels great again. That is stupid because no amount of thinking or talking is actually going to fix these feelings. Loss and grief are only solved by time.

The good part about all of this (other than cutting my monthly housing bill in half) is that my friends and family have caught me in this fall better than I could have ever hoped. To everybody who has reached out: thank you. Your kindness, friendship, and support have made this bearable and carried me through the hardest moments. People I didn’t even know well have stepped into my life to offer friendship and wisdom. In the face of one person’s horribly hurtful actions, I’ve found a few dozen kind, caring people that make everything less painful.

People have asked what I’m going to do next and if I’ll return to racing. I don’t know. None of this was planned. It feels a little like asking somebody to solve a crossword puzzle right after their arm has been chopped off. Right now I’m focused on doing my jobs, working out every day, managing the team, and spending time with good people. Anything beyond that feels like too much to decide now. I retired for reasons that mostly still stand; I saw something different in life that mattered more and looked more appealing. Just because that man and our theoretical family no longer exist doesn’t mean I stopped wanting to move on to the next chapter of my life. If I decide to race again, it will be because I realized I was swayed by something that no longer seems right for now. I’m not there yet. Yesterday was the first time I rode a bike in over a week. I’m starting there.

Apparently a week off the bike is enough time for my butt to de-acclimate to a saddle. Will the injustices ever stop???

The hardest part about realizing I’ve been living in a network of lies is the loss of both the future and the past. Every experience we shared became instantly tainted and called into question: when was I being loved and when was I being deceived? The trips to Korea, New York City, San Francisco – all wonderful memories that hurt to go near now. Quiet dinners at home, big nights out on the town, birthday celebrations, race travel, road trips, afternoons at the park with his daughter followed by beer and ice cream. What was real? How can I even think about any of those times without hurting for both the real loss of him and the intangible loss of trusting that any of it was real?

What I can take from this experience are a few personal gains. I’ve finally been to Asia, eaten ramen in three different countries, learned how to properly roast a chicken and pick a good beer, broke the cycle of my eating disorder, and quit relying on sleeping pills and antidepressants (there’s some irony). These are all good things that no heartbreak can take away.

The rest of it – the memories and shared experiences, the love I have for his daughter, the life I’d built in a city that felt like home – remains to be filed away. I can’t think about any of those things now without physically hurting.

So that’s where I am now. Well, right this moment I’m literally riding the trainer in my parents’ garage sandwiched in the narrow gap between my mother’s car and four ladders (because apparently you can never have too many ladders). This kind of absurdity feels almost like a return to normalcy. A week out from the implosion, it’s as good a place as I could have hoped to be.