It’s been almost two years and some how, still, what happened between us feels like it’s the place where my life turned towards the unfamiliar and uncertain. I’m alright with it, I can roll with the punches, but I find myself wondering if this is how I’ll mark time from now on. Two, three, four years since the life I’d hoped to live forever fell through my fingers like sand. So many years since I lost someone I thought was my soulmate. So many years since I had to put down a dream I’d been hoping for so desperately.
I wish I could find a new marker, but my brain lingers on that devastation even still. There’s that classic saying about it taking half the time to get over a heartbreak, so maybe I’m right on the precipice. I gave five years of my life to you, so two and half should do it right? Does that calculation factor in the fact that I wanted to give you all the years I have left? What about my sincere belief that we’ll have to do this again in another life? It’s nonsensical to hope it’s all simple math like that, I guess.
I don’t go looking for you anymore and most days I think of you and it’s just a passing thought. A shadow on the edge of my vision. It doesn’t hurt or nag anymore, it just is, because so many things make me think of you. When I told myself it was you and I forever, I tied so many things about me to you, so when I combine pineapple soda and peach tea together, I think of you. When one of those shows we used to like drops a new episode, I think of you. When I see certain art or hear certain songs, I think of you. When I say certain words or laugh at certain jokes, I think of you. If I can stop doing all that at the 2.5 year mark, that would be nice. If changing my life into something new and unrecognizable will make you haunt me less, that would be good too. I don’t regret leaving because the you I remember is a figment now, who you became is someone I’d never be interested in. But that old you is still here and I won’t fall into cliches about that person being a lie. You changed, is all, just like anyone else. You changed and I did too and who we became didn’t fit anymore.
I’m writing this just because you’re on my mind a lot these days. Two years coming up, your birthday just the other day and the memory of you when we were in love and the memory of who you became clash inside of me. I’m over it, I don’t cry anymore, but sometimes I dream about you, still. What part of the process am I on, that I don’t miss you, but I remember everything you love? How close am I to the end, that I’m happy to be away from you, but I know how important you were to me, how you helped me become who I am? I know you hate me and I should hate you back. Sometimes I did, but now I just… think about you. I mark your existence, your laugh, your breathing and gentility and beauty as a turning point in my life. It’s been almost two years since I last heard your voice. I hope by the time it’s been three years, I’ll have forgotten the sound.