The debilitating pain and joy that you experience when you let go of your almost relationship.
I think in everyone’s life, we all have that one person. He is that one person wasn’t ours, but we wanted so badly for him to be. He was almost everything we could have dreamed of.
Even to this day, when someone asks you the perfect person, you think back to the qualities he posed, realizing he was almost everything you needed, but the key word being almost.
Somewhere along the way, you couldn’t handle living an almost lifestyle, because you needed something concrete. You couldn’t wait any longer for him to figure it out.
The unanswered calls you suddenly realized were being unanswered by you. The 2 AM texts you didn’t even jump to answer anymore but slept through.
For so long it felt like you were standing on a subway platform for a train that wasn’t even coming, and sadly would never come, because the tracks leading to you were broken, and not getting fixed.
Conflicts between your heart and head appear like a boxing match. To walk away from someone who consumes so much of your heart, you can’t bear the thought of it. But, then in your head, you remind yourself, it is for the best you leave now. And you muster the courage to do so.
That realization feels like a breakup, but it’s a breakup in a relationship in which he wasn’t even a part of.
Then one day as you are figuring out your life, chasing the dreams you two used to talk about, and the dreams he used to encourage, you cross paths with a stranger. He asks if you are seeing anyone, and you look down at a phone that has been silent for longer than you’d like to admit.
You would have liked to say yes, you would have liked to tell him you have the greatest boyfriend in the entire world, who consumes so many thoughts as you go to sleep at night. But you don’t and you can’t and you realize, all those things he ever said, were just a compilation of words that sounded nice.
The hardest part about this isn’t accepting the drink a stranger buys you or getting to know a new person and fall for them. The hardest part comes with acceptance of how much time you wasted with someone who never actually saw a future with you.
In that time you found out each other’s secrets. You viewed the skeletons in each other’s closets with a smile holding them as they shed tears. You grew to know their story as well as become a part of it, but the part you played in one another’s story was only temporary.
Even if it was temporary, there is no denying you fell in love with everything they were, even if part of that was a toxic relationship full of false promises and a life full of almost things that never came to be.
You wonder if anyone could know you the way he did. You wonder when something really bad happens and you don’t reach for your cell phone to text him, as he was one of the few to really understand, can you handle that alone?
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