...And there it was; everything I ever wanted staring back at me. He was grovelling. I had won. But, no one really wins when it comes to this. It wasn't too little too late. It was always too much.
Some may argue that if you really loved someone, you wouldn't walk away. To you, I say fuck you. We loved each other but we walked away-- crawling, clawing at times to escape the trap of how much we loved each other. Then some may argue that we weren't really soulmates. To you, I say fuck you. Because a soul knows when it has found it's counterpart in this world. It just wasn't meant for this lifetime. In a perfect world it would have been magic between us. But, this isn't a perfect world and we aren't perfect people, and sometimes soulmates let you down.
The night we met was like two consciousnesses from lifetimes ago reconnecting and the familiar flair of fascination and comfort wrapped us in its warm arms and called us a pair. I remember the first kiss tasting like home and I realized that sparks were a real feeling; little fireworks going off in the back of my brain, heart fluttering. There was never a moment of hesitation. We could read each other like a book we had read a hundred times. Everything was exact. The way I knew his hands would find the small of my back. The way we knew exactly how to waltz our way into the next long deep kiss and keep perfect time. All the cheesy shit they talk about in movies and books-- it's real, intoxicating, addictive.
Was.
We never did anything quietly. Loving, fighting, cooking dinner, all of it a production. Our two sagittarian types, individually, could dominate any room full of people. Together we were a cacophony. Every moment of hysterical laughter, confession of love, act of selflessness stared back at me from the couch across the room. I folded. For every laugh, declaration, or gesture there was a dark side. The harsh reality of our all-encompassing love affair was that it consumed us both-- and eventually itself.
He ended it under the pretense that it was all too much too fast. It was hard to forgive him for that because he said he loved me first. I described it to my friends like having a third arm ripped off. In my conditioned autonomy, I felt complete before him and I knew I would be alright without him but it didn't keep it from hurting like a sonofabitch or from making me feel utterly crippled by his reneging.
We spent three times as long as we were together not being together, together. We still spent every day with each other and I woke up every morning in his bed, or he in mine-- but we weren't together. We still had passion and romance and spent the holidays together-- but we weren't together. It was the worst form of not being together because we were, just without the 'together'. We both tried to move on, but it was a freedom I didn't want. Every glimmer of his moving on turned me into a jealous shrew. I had become what I always hated and I blamed him for making me that way.
Eventually, my only defense against the reality was to change it. It took endless screaming matches between us before I resolved to never understand how we could be seeing, feeling, living the same damn thing and ending at different results; like he was somehow getting five adding two and two. The very thing that drew me to him and kept me fighting for us was the same thing driving him away-- we were just too much alike. I kept waiting for the day when I couldn't fight him anymore and it wasn't coming.
Until it finally did.
I felt so free as I told him to leave for the last time. I spent the next month easily ignoring his pleas for reconciliation. This is what we do, he'd argue. But it wasn't 'what we do' anymore. There it was; everything I had ever wanted staring back at me. He was grovelling. And no one won.
They say that drowning is one of the most peaceful ways to die. You can only fight to swim for so long, but once you fill your lungs with water, you drift into unconsciousness quietly, submerged, serene. This is what it felt like. I had finally taken in our fate and drifted into my new reality of a life where he and I were really no longer together.
