Sometimes, when we talk long enough, we wonder what could have been. “What if we never broke up?” “I’d probably stay home for school because I wouldn’t have the heart to leave you.” “Yeah, and I’d probably be in school right now. Maybe we’d go to school together.” “I would have done your applications for you if you refused to.” “We’d walk around Chinatown and see indie art shows and music and all that stuff.” “That would have been nice..” He tells me how he’s always thought I’d be walking the streets of New York in a flimsy relationship with boys who paid the bills with their guitar. He thought I’d travel and be a starving artist. He never saw me settling down and having kids — he thought my ambitions were too good for that. And here I am, afraid of the world and thinking about getting hitched at 22, kids at 25, with a boy who signed his life away to the military. I second guess myself a lot. Sometimes, when I’m sad, he’s the only person I don’t resent. He doesn’t try to cheer me up, but he doesn’t bring me down. His strategy is to talk. He understands what I mean when I say I’ve been in a constant depression since the 5th grade. He understands what I mean when I say I’m always sad, but sometimes I’m happy. He doesn’t say that it doesn’t make sense, he says that he feels that way too. He understands that I search for happiness in the form of something tangible and temporary, like alcohol or drugs, or even scars from self-destruction. He understands that sometimes, it’s what you need. He doesn’t tell me it’s wrong, he tells me to control it. The feelings I have for him were never of love. I never saw myself having a future with him…just a present. When I was in the moment, he was in that moment with me. We had our run but it’s never supposed to be us in the end. We’re only in love when we’re drunk. In the real world, we don’t belong together. In the real world we know that even if we wanted to be together, we wouldn’t work out. He is the male version of me, I am the female version of him, and I could never love someone like myself.
The Ex.
