Regret looks like eye contact

I have always said that anger rises up inside of me like fire. It burns my heart first, and then my stomach, and then my throat. I'll say something I'll regret later.

But then sometimes, I say nothing at all. And that's what hurts the most.

I was the maid of honor. I was supposed to plan her bachelorette party.

Rewind to two months prior:

I am laying in bed, checking my phone periodically; it is 9PM on a Saturday night. I should be out with friends, or even just not in bed, when I get a text on Tinder from a guy I had just matched with.

He said, "Hey, I'm at ____ Bar downtown. Want to meet up?"

I usually would have said no. That's the thing! But I had just been dumped by another guy just a few weeks earlier, and had no new luck with dating.

So, rolling over in bed to respond on my phone, I said "Sure, see you there."

This guy, I'll call him William, was very drunk by the time I got to ___ Bar downtown. But it was adorable. He was hilarious. Maybe it was because he was a happy drunk, but it was clear he didn't give a f___ what anyone thought of him. He just - was. Who he was.

He complimented me on my sweater and we spent the next two months dating.

Here's where it gets messy. He didn't want to hang out with me on New Year's Eve, after two months of dating, which I thought was weird, and it definitely raised red flags. When he finally, after two weeks of not seeing each other, offered to meet me at a local coffee shop, I said yes. Of course I wanted to meet him. I liked him a lot. I wanted to keep dating him.

After sitting there for maybe twenty minutes, he said, "I've been seeing someone else. That night at ____ Bar downtown? I had just broken up with her. But now we're back together."

Then he said, "But you're a really nice girl."

I decided to act on anger in that moment. I made eye contact with him, not saying anything, refusing to break it, until he looked down, flustered, and mumbled something else.

Probably something about how I was "a nice girl."

I was furious.

Fast forward to two months after that. I am the maid of honor, trying to plan a bachelorette party for my friend.

It was a disaster.

I have never been good at planning anything, not really. I picked a grim little Airbnb, without any planned activities except going to a restaurant near the Airbnb, also a grim little place. But how was I to know that?

I was so, so angry. And when one of my friend's friends started talking about her perfect marriage after dinner, I lost it.

I let anger take over.

I walked out. Later, in therapy, I would talk about this moment, regretfully. But then my therapist went: "That's it ? I thought, from how regretful you seem, that you had thrown a wine bottle at her."

But I don't have that kind of anger.

I have the kind of anger that simmers. And as I listened to her talk about her perfect marriage, something in me cracked in half. I literally couldn't take it anymore. And since we weren't making eye contact, and I couldn't hold it until she looked away in shame, like with William, I simply reacted by walking out, not saying goodnight, not saying anything.

And so I went to bed like that.

My friend didn't talk to me for a year and a half after that night. I had ruined her bachelorette party. I had ruined it for her, for everyone, and for myself.

But of course, I can't blame men. I can't blame being dumped twice in three months. I have no one to blame but myself.

But dang, does anger rise up sometimes. And it hurts; that vomit in your throat that just turns sour and not even into words. It just sits there with unbreakable eye contact and hypothetical smashed wine bottles.