decision to leave
i was the one who said we shouldn’t speak anymore. i remember thinking there wasn’t a version of this that didn’t end with me hurting. i could stay, and spend my days waiting for something that had never been promised. or i could leave, which was another kind of hurt, but at least it belonged to me. leaving felt less like giving up on you than refusing to give up on myself.
loving you had never been difficult. that was the uncomplicated part. you were easy to love. i used to think that if i loved you well enough, patiently enough, eventually we would arrive at the same place. heh. i don’t know why i believed that. people believe many things because they need them to be true.
i was never the girl you wanted. there isn’t much more to say about that. some absences remain occupied long after the person has gone. she was gone, perhaps, but not from you. i was always arriving somewhere that had already been filled.
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i left because i didn’t want to watch myself become someone who mistook endurance for dignity. there comes a point when staying begins to look less like hope and more like habit.
i don’t regret leaving. what surprises me is that you continue to appear in places where i no longer expect you: a dream; an ordinary afternoon; a sentence i almost send. memory has a way of making itself seem current. it insists on becoming the present.
sometimes i think about the life we never had. not that i believe it still exists somewhere, waiting for us, but merely because the mind has a tendency to revisit unfinished things.
i know why i left. i only wish my heart would stop behaving as though you might still return.
