discuss the things that happened, but that's just acting like the past is only a collection of events to be listed off like a mind numbing history lecture. It doesn't tell you the significance and the emotion, the love and the hate, the pain and the euphoria, the rage and the grace of everything that happened. I'm faced with the challenge of having to tell you this in a way that doesn't make you roll your eyes, in a way that doesn't make you wonder why you should care, in a way that doesn't make you wonder why I'm bothering. Yet to me, this was one of the greatest and most terrible things in my life. How can I really encompass it all in just words and communicate it to you?
She was... well, you hear the phrase The One That Got Away thrown around a lot. It's tempting to say that. But that's too simple, that's an unfair reduction of everything into a neat little container. Calling her that would ignore all the times when it was good, really good, the times that were some of the greatest in my life, the best times with anyone I'd ever met. To just say she was The One That Got Away also minimizes all the fights, all the arguments, all the times I nearly threw my phone at the wall, and all the awkward and painful times we held each other in our arms when things were definitely not all right.
There were problems. And the relationship had ended in pure and total devastation. But the one thing I won't say is It Just Didn't Work Out . No phrase infuriates me more than that one. It Just Didn't Work Out does no justice to the relationship. It Just Didn't Work Out is just telling someone the ending of it all. It's telling someone the butler did it. It wipes away the whole story, the whole life of a relationship. It Just Didn't Work Out is refusing someone an explanation and just showing them the ending credits. It's all so much more complicated than that - for every relationship, not just mine.
It did end, and not recently, as much as it lingered in my mind. We last left things in the raw red of an argument and then there was no time for reconciliation. She got on that plane to study in Paris, and that was that. Gone for what I thought would be good. Unless I had been willing to scrape together the cash for a ticket to France, cyberstalk her for her address, and then attempt to get her back in full on RomCom glory, that was it. Game over, man. Thanks for playing.
As my brother could tell you, I had dated since then. I had been in relationships. Sort of. I'd dated girls for weeks, sometimes a month, then lost interest. It was never deep, and when I broke it off it was from my own disinterest and realizing that I was inadvertently stringing these girls along. Total It's Not You, It's Me territory. It was always me. I never denied that part. I always knew something was lacking and it was always on my end. It might take a few weeks and a dozen denials from me, but the result was always the same. It was the same reason hidden in all the excuses I made, in all the permutations on the breakup speech, in all the emotional blocks that kept me from caring how I should. It always was the same reason deep down.
They weren't her.
How fucked up was that? Somewhere in my mind, I always kind of knew this was true, but I did nothing. I didn't jump a plane to France, I didn't start a full on emo blog of tragic poetry, I didn't even once email her to see how she was. I had let her go and hadn't been the same since. Real cavalier about being a broken asshole, Mikkel.
And here I was, now staring right at her.
I'll say that for all the good things, all the great things, the super wow things it can do, the heart is kind of an asshole. The strongest feelings we have are never when things are stable, never when things are solid, never when we can handle things. The sharpest feelings are when things are either super good or super bad, as if the heart only ever wants to add gasoline to a fire. And the heart has all the subtlety of a freight train. It's
She was... well, you hear the phrase The One That Got Away thrown around a lot. It's tempting to say that. But that's too simple, that's an unfair reduction of everything into a neat little container. Calling her that would ignore all the times when it was good, really good, the times that were some of the greatest in my life, the best times with anyone I'd ever met. To just say she was The One That Got Away also minimizes all the fights, all the arguments, all the times I nearly threw my phone at the wall, and all the awkward and painful times we held each other in our arms when things were definitely not all right.
There were problems. And the relationship had ended in pure and total devastation. But the one thing I won't say is It Just Didn't Work Out . No phrase infuriates me more than that one. It Just Didn't Work Out does no justice to the relationship. It Just Didn't Work Out is just telling someone the ending of it all. It's telling someone the butler did it. It wipes away the whole story, the whole life of a relationship. It Just Didn't Work Out is refusing someone an explanation and just showing them the ending credits. It's all so much more complicated than that - for every relationship, not just mine.
It did end, and not recently, as much as it lingered in my mind. We last left things in the raw red of an argument and then there was no time for reconciliation. She got on that plane to study in Paris, and that was that. Gone for what I thought would be good. Unless I had been willing to scrape together the cash for a ticket to France, cyberstalk her for her address, and then attempt to get her back in full on RomCom glory, that was it. Game over, man. Thanks for playing.
As my brother could tell you, I had dated since then. I had been in relationships. Sort of. I'd dated girls for weeks, sometimes a month, then lost interest. It was never deep, and when I broke it off it was from my own disinterest and realizing that I was inadvertently stringing these girls along. Total It's Not You, It's Me territory. It was always me. I never denied that part. I always knew something was lacking and it was always on my end. It might take a few weeks and a dozen denials from me, but the result was always the same. It was the same reason hidden in all the excuses I made, in all the permutations on the breakup speech, in all the emotional blocks that kept me from caring how I should. It always was the same reason deep down.
They weren't her.
How fucked up was that? Somewhere in my mind, I always kind of knew this was true, but I did nothing. I didn't jump a plane to France, I didn't start a full on emo blog of tragic poetry, I didn't even once email her to see how she was. I had let her go and hadn't been the same since. Real cavalier about being a broken asshole, Mikkel.
And here I was, now staring right at her.
I'll say that for all the good things, all the great things, the super wow things it can do, the heart is kind of an asshole. The strongest feelings we have are never when things are stable, never when things are solid, never when we can handle things. The sharpest feelings are when things are either super good or super bad, as if the heart only ever wants to add gasoline to a fire. And the heart has all the subtlety of a freight train. It's
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