I have never understood how people can leave you when you’re in tears. When your eyes are wet and tears are streaming down your face, how does someone simply walk away? Especially when they are the only person there to witness it. How do you look at someone you care about falling apart in front of you and decide that you can leave them alone in it?
Unfortunately, this is a place I’ve found myself in more than once. Yes, I’m sensitive. Yes, I get sad over things quickly, and sometimes that sadness overwhelms me more than it probably should. But maybe that is also why I find it so difficult to understand. I know what it feels like to be left alone in tears, and because I know that feeling so intimately, I could never knowingly give it to someone else. I couldn’t walk away from someone who was crying because of something I had done. I couldn’t hear someone I love breaking down and decide that their pain could wait until I was ready to deal with it.
I’ve been hung up on while crying on the phone, begging someone to please just be nice to me. I’ve gone to bed crying while the person beside me pretended not to hear. I’ve had people walk away from me in the middle of active breakdowns. I’ve listened to someone fall asleep peacefully while I lay beside them crying. And these weren’t all the same person. That might be the saddest part. I have experienced different versions of the same abandonment from different people, enough times to know exactly what comes after. The neglect. The heartbreak. The strange chills that run through you when you realise you are completely alone in a room with someone else. And then the spiral that pulls you further and further down into the darkest parts of yourself, where suddenly you feel ridiculously, unbearably unlovable. Because you have just been seen at your weakest by the one person you thought your pain would matter to, and they chose to leave you there anyway.
There is something particularly cruel about being ignored while you are visibly hurting. It isn’t only the sadness you were already feeling anymore. Now there is another wound layered on top of it. The realisation that your tears weren’t enough to make them stay. That your trembling voice wasn’t enough to soften them. That even when your pain was right there in front of them, impossible to misunderstand, they were still capable of turning away. And in moments like that, you don’t just question what happened. You begin questioning what you mean to them at all.
Being a broken person sometimes means needing twice, maybe three times, the reassurance another person might need. It means there are wounds you didn’t create but may sometimes have to help carry. And I understand that can be a lot. For someone detached, emotionally unavailable, or simply unable to love in that way, those can be impossibly big shoes to fill. But when you choose to love someone, surely part of that choice is learning the person you are loving. Understanding that what feels insignificant to you might be enormous to them. That something you could brush off in an hour might keep them awake all night.
And then, just as I finished writing all of this, I remembered something that makes me feel like a bit of a hypocrite.
Because once, I was the person who watched someone cry and couldn’t find it in myself to comfort them.
I had caught him texting other people during one of the busiest weeks I’d had at work. I told him I would see him once the week was over because I simply did not have the time or emotional capacity to deal with everything while trying to get through work. I wasn’t refusing to deal with it. I was asking for time. I had made that boundary clear.
Then came one of the longest and biggest days of that week, ending with an evening event. I finally came home late and exhausted, knowing I had to be awake again by six in the morning. I already struggled to fall asleep that night, and when I eventually did, sometime around three in the morning, I suddenly sensed that someone else was in my room.
He had a key to my place.
When I opened my eyes, he was sitting on the floor of my bedroom going through my phone.
Seeing him there threw me into a fit of rage. The shock alone sent my entire nervous system into overdrive, and all I could do was yell and tell him to get the fuck out. How someone could be so inconsiderate was beyond my understanding. First you break my heart. You betray my trust for months. You lie to me over and over again, and then finally get caught because you were sleazy enough to leave evidence behind. And after all of that, I ask for one thing. Give me a week. Give me the space to survive one of the busiest weeks of my life before I have to deal with the mess you created. Instead, you let yourself into my home at three in the morning, while I am asleep, and sit on my bedroom floor going through my phone when I have to be awake three hours later.
And then he started crying.
I admit, I couldn’t find a way to empathise with him. Not then. This was after months and months of cruelty I had endured at the hands of this man, and suddenly I was expected to have tenderness left for his pain too. His tears couldn’t reach me through everything else I was feeling. I was too exhausted, too angry, too startled and too consumed by the sheer violation of what had just happened. I wanted him out of my house.
Remembering that immediately after writing about how incomprehensible I find it to leave someone crying made me stop. Because apparently, under the right circumstances, I could do it too.
And maybe that makes what I wrote earlier a little too absolute.
Tears alone do not automatically entitle someone to your comfort. Someone can be genuinely hurting and still have hurt you terribly. Their pain does not erase yours, and protecting yourself does not suddenly become cruelty simply because the person who hurt you is now crying. Sometimes walking away is not abandonment. Sometimes it is a boundary. Sometimes you have already given someone so much of yourself that there is simply nothing left in you to give them in that moment.
So let me change what I said.
If someone you love has done nothing to hurt you, if they are suffering in front of you and reaching for you, especially if you have played some part in why they are hurting, I cannot understand choosing to leave them there. I cannot understand hearing someone you love cry and deciding that you can simply go about your night while they fall apart alone.
And I think that is part of loving someone too. You inherit an understanding of wounds you had no hand in creating. You learn that certain things hurt them more deeply because of what came before you, and while those wounds are not yours to heal, sometimes loving them means holding them through the pain anyway. It means being careful with the places you know are already tender. You may not have given them their fear of abandonment, but once you know it exists, surely it matters what you choose to do with that knowledge. You can be the person who makes that wound feel a little safer, or the person who confirms every reason it was there in the first place.
Maybe loving someone isn’t just about feeling love for them. Maybe love is also what you choose to do when that person is hurting in front of you. And when you are the reason they hurt, perhaps love asks you to stay long enough to help carry what you have made heavier. Because there are only so many times you can leave someone drowning in their own tears and still call what you are giving them love.
And I’ll end this with the annoyingly simple wisdom of a friend who listened to me wrestle with all of this and reduced my many paragraphs to a single sentence:
“If he wanted to, he would.”
Stay, I mean.
