It’s nice to have options even if you can’t take them.
I’d chosen instead to just change my route, go miles out of the way, as if avoiding it would make it go away once and for all.
If you didn’t always have to choose between turning away for good or rushing in deeper. In the moments that it really counts, maybe it’s enough – more than enough, even – just to be there.
We can’t expect everybody to be there for us, all at once. So it’s a lucky thing that really, all you need is someone.
But I’d long ago learned not to be picky in farewells. They weren’t guaranteed or promised. You were lucky, more than blessed, if you got a good-bye at all.
Harder to get in than out, like so little else.
But the bottom line is that, as humans, we are by nature selfish creatures. The only way we care about anything, really, is by making it about us.
It was such a weird thing how a breakup stretched much wider than you expected. You didn’t just lose a person, but their entire world as well.
Like life isn’t complicated enough. You should at least be able to follow the signs.
I thought of all the times we’d been together, how I kept coming closer, then retreating, while he stayed right where he was. A constant in a world where few, if any, really existed.
I’d been running for years: there was nothing scarier, to me, than to just be still with someone. And yet, there on that dark road, going home, I was.
In the end, though, maybe it’s not how you reach a place that matters. Just that you get there at all.
And guys don’t get attached, guys don’t give themselves over completely, and guys lie. That’s why they should be handled with great trepidation, not trusted, and held at arm’s length whenever possible.
I’d been through so much, falling short again and again, and only recently had found a place where who I was, right now, was enough.
Was it really this easy, once you escaped, to just not care?
It was as familiar to me as a song I’d been hearing my whole life, covered by various people but the basic tune the same.
Maybe it was just part of growing up with someone. Once you have a rhythm and stay with it long enough, it’s not hard to find again.
I wanted to tell him so. Find the right words, string them together in the ideal way, knowing that here they would have the best chance of sounding perfect.
I had to wonder whether it was possible that this wasn’t already decided for me, and if maybe, just maybe, this was my one last chance to try and prove it. There was no way to know. There never is. But I reached out and took it anyway.
You’re not a sucker. You’re just nice. You give people the benefit of the doubt.