It’s funny how the moment romance enters the stage of your life, it immediately shoves its way to the front and sends all the other actors rushing to the wings. I’m not sure if anything else has that power. Maybe death. It’s even funnier how easily you can hand that power over to a complete stranger. But the funniest is when somehow, it clicks.
That’s my explanation for why this blog has been silent for the last little while. My guitar hasn’t, as it’s been suffering the brunt of my trying to arrange the fragments of lyrics under my skin into something that rhymes.
Usually you don’t know if something is the right thing or not until after you’ve done it. Now I realize that she was the right girl at the wrong time. She was better than perfect–she had all the right imperfections. It helps that for once, it didn’t go wrong because of some big dumb error on my side. We fell into each other, shared a couple heartbeats, and then she was off in her direction, and now I’m off in mine. I’m just grateful that we collided. She’s blurring into one of those memories that puts a smile on your face and a rock in your chest all at once.
I don’t think there’s such a thing as a clean break. There are those moments when your eyes catch her like they’re used to, and you aren’t sure whether to say hi or just keep walking. Or when the pressure builds up enough that you’re walking to her door for answers, knowing full well that you’re probably walking to your own execution, but knowing just as well that if she’s going to break your heart, you want it to happen in person. There’s a lovely reconciliation in that.
The whole thing is a little like cutting your arm off and then trying to ignore the fact that you don’t have an arm anymore. And at any moment you could just run into your arm anywhere. One day you’re riding the bus and your arm gets on, and you’re like, “Oh hey arm, didn’t realize I’d see you here. Looks like you’re doing well. Glad to hear it.” So I’m still learning how to not look for her anymore.
Every other day is hard. The bad days are when “the way it might have been” is at high tide, and you realize just how many blank pages were left after the good part ended. Those are the times when it’s hard not to ask, “What happened to the ‘I’m so glad I met you’ and the ‘I’ll see you in the morning’?” Someone else has won those battles. Though I guess I wasn’t really even invited to the table.
The two perspectives that help the most are the close-up and the wide-angle. Closing my eyes to tomorrow hides the ruins of a sorely miscalculated future, if only briefly. But the good moments are when I’m high enough to look out over the mountains and be grateful for that tiny fraction of our lives, perhaps barely a day long, perhaps barely an hour, when each other was all that we wanted, and we had it.
That’s something I’ll always have. ∎
