Clarity

It was a few weeks since I last had any contact with Chad. I was making it a point to avoid any type of communication with him since our relationship was less than perfect at the time. Not that it was ever perfect mind you; in fact, I would have settled for normal if I could. If I'm being totally honest, our relationship was, in a word, toxic, characterized by passion and love, with no real substance to ground us. The perils of youth one could say, although that assumes only the young are capable of doing stupid things, and I have far too many examples of stupid things adults do to disprove that point.

It's always difficult, I think, breaking up. Most people assume it ends with a discussion, with the parties mutually agreeing to stop seeing each other. Sometimes there are tears, or harsh words, or things thrown, but the common idea is that everything happens at that one point, as if something that important could be so easily and neatly summed up and discarded in a half hour. As if the relationship you just had with that one person was nothing more than a footnote in your otherwise perfectly normal life.

But the idea doesn't take into account the slow deterioration, the unraveling of passion, the almost imperceptible, but unmistakable, disintegration of affection. If the relationship wasn't working in the first place, the cracks will show, and the lovers will grow distant, and things will start to fall apart. But the initial process is barely recognizable, until at some point the couple realizes that they are at a place neither of them had thought they could ever come before. And the breaking up, especially with a person you love, is rarely just a one time deal; most likely it's a process that will take a while to stick.

Breakups are rarely simple, at least in my experience.

In Chad's case, we didn't really break-up, since there was nothing to break in the first place. What relationship we had was in one of those gray, blurry areas that mimicked all the symptoms of a "real" relationship, only that it wasn't. We can be postmodern about it, and say that it had no label, and it would be true, because what we had was really, well, undefinable. I hate admitting it, because it makes the relationship seem so trivial, but it was true, and maybe it really was as trivial as it seems.

So I think I was already starting to settle back into my usual routine, with sudden pangs of pain here and there (it is impossible to just walk away from a person you love I think, even if you know it's what's best for you), when I got a text message from him. It started with the usual pleasantries (How are you? I miss you. What have you been up to?) and ended with an invitation to meet up. I didn't reply, because I didn't know what to say. I knew what I wanted to say and what I needed to say (and the gap between what I wanted and what I needed was oceans-wide), but I had absolutely no idea what I would actually say. So I waited. I figured I didn't need to decide right then.

It was midnight when I texted back. And though it broke my heart to do so, I told him what I needed to say, my head slowly, but inexorably, dismantling the fantasy of the conversation I wanted, dreamed to have.

Photo taken here.