I wait for a text message that I know will not come.
Come back.
Can we talk?
Can we see each other?
I miss you.
I love you.
What are we doing?
We should be together.
Anything. From the other room I hear the ding of my cell phone, hoping it’s from you, even though I know it’s not. Instead it’s a from a friend, surprised at the score of last night’s game.
Until I receive a text message and not think of you, the pain of being apart will be triggered by each ping, each reach of the phone.
And by so many other things all around me, in my head, in my apartment, in this city.
I know the routine by now. Go cold turkey. Avoid you on social media. Get out, be around people, foster good habits and take ownership of the direction of my life.
But I was already doing that.
I’m mad. And upset and hurt and sad, and yeah, afraid. Afraid of the sadness and the ache I feel right now and that I know will last until…when exactly?
I am so, so tired of watching wounds turn into scars.
And while I don’t fear loneliness, and don’t fear being without you, of not seeing you, of losing you, for now and/or forever, as a friend, I mourn for that reality.
I mourn for the moment when the pain will subside, when it will no longer hurt, because the hurt breathes as a symbol of my love for you. When my cell phone pings and I don’t think of you, I’ll miss the pain of missing you.
. . .
Somewhere down the line there was a feeling about us, about me, that you lost. It wasn’t that long ago, days, weeks, months, when you felt the opposite. You told me. And I felt it.
But something turned, and you lost the desire to fight for us. It was too hard. It got to be harder to stay together than to split. I argued it’s that way for most couples, at some point, but even I must concede it happened too much for us.
Still.
We can’t explain it or understand it. We want so much for our love to produce something other than it does.
We’ve learned to repair and recover from the times we hurt each other, sometimes intentionally, others not. But we never learned to stop failing each other in the first place.
I’m mad. Mad at you, for not being able to move on with me, instead of without me. I’m mad, at you, for what I know what will come in the future: regret.
By choosing to make things easier on us now, we are sacrificing the love we could cultivate, grow and experience together in the future. We forsake the good times that could lay ahead for the repeated troubles that occur today.
I’m mad, at myself, for not being able to find a way to be the partner you need or want.
I’m mad, at myself, for being able to tolerate so much I do not like, to be able to press on despite misgivings, in never boiling over. I finally got around to setting demands and boundaries for myself, and within weeks we collapsed.
Am I supposed to be proud or mad at myself for getting out of your car and walking away, this time, you and I both know, for good?
We’ve tried.
But we’re tired of trying. It should be easier.
I work so hard, each day, to be my best self, for myself. And I sometimes miss, sometimes in very serious ways. I worked so hard, each day, to be my best self, for you. And I sometimes missed, in ways that led us to this.
And here I am, wondering about all that we share, our collective failures, our attempts at repairs, our love. We share so much, and now we add another thing to that list: our sadness of being apart from each other.
It feels so wrong. It’s not what either of us wants, yet…
Like love itself, we don’t understand how it can be, where there is much more that unites us and brings us together, that it feels being together has forced us apart.
Someone, please, tell me how this happened.
. . .
After building up a friendship and love for years, we both agree, in the literal moments before we part, that we can’t articulate a reason to separate other than feeling that we fail each other too often and something just feels…not there.
Is that the weight of expectation dooming us, or is it an earnest truth that we’ve grown apart? That we don’t serve or offer each other what we need and want?
Because nothing about the way I feel about you wants us to be apart, even if I can acknowledge our struggles, our patterns of falling back into a place where neither of us want to be.
I fear regret. I fear coming to our senses in a week, a month, a year or more…and wondering, and being unable to answer, why was it we walked away from our love? Why couldn’t we figure it out, if there was no reason to leave?
We tried, we’ll tell ourselves. Yet we so often returned to awkwardness, of frustration, of distance, of not being the partner the other needed.
And by not sticking together, we’ll feel regret and have nothing but to trust our younger, earlier selves that we did what was best at the time. Is that what this is? The best thing we can do right now?
No matter. This is no time for judgment, although I’ve already reached my conclusions.
When I picture you today, and in the future, you will be smiling and beautiful. The light will shine off your face the way I always remember it doing. It was always so hard for me to be mad at you, because when I look at you (and here it’s too hard for me to use the past tense) I fall back in love with you.
Even in the hour before we split, you took my breath away.
We’ll live with the pain of knowing what we once were, knowing how good it could have been but wasn’t. We’ll live with the sadness that we couldn’t reach our best selves enough. And wonder why. Until there will come a day when we’ll have both moved on, and who knows? We won’t even know where each other are.
I yearn to not ache over you, but I so don’t want to let go. I will, though. You will too. That’s what brings tears to my eyes.
Maybe we’re lucky we don’t have a reason. Maybe we’re fortunate there’s no symbol or sign we can point to that says, yes, this is why we can’t or shouldn’t be together.
Maybe the absence of that will keep the memories we have for each other enmeshed and protected in love and happiness. But you and I both know, if that’s the case, it’s that love we’ll wonder about, wondering why it was shut.
I’m alone now, in my apartment, sitting at the table with only the living room reading light on. I wonder what you are doing. I wonder if you are thinking of me. I wonder if you miss me.
The phone mirrors silence, the same silence coming from me.
. . .
Farewell love. Farewell, my love.
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This post was previously published on P.S. I Love You and is republished here with permission from the author.
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