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I think I can do it now. I think I can lay down the whole painful story. Maybe then I can be done with it.

I've only had 3 relationships in my life. The first was just over 7 years long with a girl named Mandy, and ended when she cheated on me and dumped me. After 7 years, you can imagine how much of a shock that was. To pour salt on the wound, it turns out she was cheating on me at the exact same time that I was out shopping for an engagement ring. Ouch. However, it was a very poor relationship. Mandy was terrible to me, and I was really only still in it because years of being with her had lowered my self esteem to the point that I believed I could never find another girlfriend. As bad an ending as it was, it didn't really hurt me too badly and ended up being the best thing that ever happened to me.

My second girl was Aliesha. I was with her for just shy of a year. It wasn't a bad break up and we're still good friends today.

My last girl was Shauna. She's the one who tore my soul out. We had met when I was still with my first girl, not too long before the end of that relationship. We were just friends for a long time, and she helped console me when my first girl left. Quickly she became my very best friend.

After my second girl left me, she told me that she wanted to be my girlfriend, and that she had actually moved to Victoria not only for UVic, but more importantly because she wanted to be with me. You can imagine how stunned and flattered I was, amongst other things.

Shauna was the girl of my dreams. I adored her. It was the strangest thing. As soon as I was going out with her, I didn't have eyes for anyone else. I could tell if a girl was attractive of course, but it never occurred to me to check out other girls anymore. That never happened in the other relationships, I always still looked. Totally stopped when Shauna and I started going out. Eventually she moved in with me and lived with me while she went to school, going home in the summer to visit her family and work.

Shortly after Shauna moved in with me, she proposed to me. I was shocked. I'd wanted to propose to her of course, but she was young and I didn't want to scare her off or make her feel like I was trying to tie her down. I had nothing but time, so I figured I'd wait until her grad or something. Needless to say, when she popped the question I said yes. I couldn't afford much of an engagement ring at the time, so I got her a promise ring that she loved.

Fast forward to this summer. Shauna goes home, and everything seems fine. She calls me every day to say hi, tell me she misses me, stuff like that. It makes me feel good that she clearly misses me and loves me as much as I miss and love her. She's from Nelson, which is kind of a hippie town as it were. A pretty sizable drug culture there.

Shauna and I grew up in very different environments. When I was a kid it was drilled into me that drugs were the bogeyman, and that they'd ruin your life and kill you. Silly I know, but it's what I grew up with. She grew up with stories of great musicians and their drug trips and use and so on and so forth. So, unlike me, She was very much interested in having those experiences.

So, about a month and a bit after she arrived home for the summer, she and her friends decided to do acid. My knee jerk reaction is panic, of course, and I sent her an email which basically begged her to be careful. She replied telling me how much she loved me, but these were experiences she wanted to have and she needed me to respect that. So I let her know that I do, and that I trust her. I just want her to be safe.

After she did acid everything changed. She stopped calling me. She stopped emailing me. She always seemed like she didn't want to talk whenever I would call her. I tried not to call too often, because I didn't want to make her feel crowded, but I was still her fiance, and the way she was treating me really hurt. She said she was just feeling a little claustrophobic. I'm stupid, so I believed her.

Now, the whole time she'd been back in Nelson, she'd been hanging out with this guy every day. He was a new addition to her group of friends, so when she got back, he was just always around. No big deal I thought. She loves me, she'd never do anything. I trusted her implicitly. After she took acid I became less comfortable because of the change in her behavior, but I kept telling myself I was just being paranoid because of what happened in my first relationship. About 5 days before she was coming back to Victoria to visit, everything seemed to go back to normal.

She came to visit and everything was wonderful. I took her out for a really fancy dinner to celebrate her birthday. I gave her a really sweet bass guitar for her birthday (which she accepted but has since returned). We had a wonderful time. We even got tattoos the day before she left. She's represented in my tattoo as a pink star. I asked her before I got it if she was sure she was comfortable with that. She assured me she was.

7 days later she emailed me to tell me she was leaving me. She said she needed to find out who she was outside of a relationship. It tore me apart. We'd known each other for 4 years, she had been my best friend for the majority of that time. I was devastated, but I held out hope that maybe after she'd had some time to herself, that she might come back.

It turns out that she had left me for that guy. I found that out 6 weeks later, the night before she arrived back in town. She called me the next morning to arrange to pick up her stuff. She didn't know that I had found out. And when I told her, she didn't even seem sorry, just angry that I had found out. I told her she could get her stuff, but she could not send him. Anyone but him, he wasn't welcome here.

So she sent him. I eventually had to call the police because he wouldn't leave and tried to break in my door. I'm still stunned that the woman I loved for so long, the one who had me totally convinced that she loved me too, was capable of something so callous and cruel. A week later she made it official, announcing she was in a relationship with this guy on facebook, less than 2 months after sending the email where she claimed she needed to find out who she was outside of a relationship.

My friends told me the best way to get over it was to get back out there. My heart just isn't in it though. Assuming I still have a heart. Sometimes I think I do, other times I'm pretty sure it's damaged beyond repair. I still wake up every morning and feel her in bed beside me, like an amputee with a phantom limb. It's almost like having someone close to you die. It feels unreal, like it's happening to someone else. Then the enormity of it hits you and it almost feels like you'll be crushed by the weight of it. The mind is interesting, it finds ways to keep you from thinking about it, but it can't stop it entirely.

So that's it. That's my whole story. I don;t know if I feel better now that the whole thing is down, but maybe I will later. I hope so.