Walking Away

When I met you, I was still lost in someone else. Still a broken, incomplete person, dealing with the hurt from the past. Still trying to find myself in those pieces. 

Back then, I never thought I could ever feel that way about someone again. I thought that the next time I fall for someone, my heart would be more guarded, more afraid, less willing to take risks. Because that's the person I was back then. Every time I started to feel anything about someone, I would force myself to snap out of it. Pull myself back to rationality.

But then you walked in. At first, I didn't give it much thought. I didn't think I needed any safety because I saw you as just another person I would eventually pull myself away from. I didn't think of you as someone who was here to stay. When I first realized that you were becoming more important to me than I'd anticipated, I still believed that I had it under control, that it was just a rush of feelings on meeting someone new, that it would go away. 

And that was true till an extent. After a while, we lost touch. And that might have been the end of it. I was normal again. Or as close as it got to that. I would will myself back to rationality, prevent myself from thinking about you, distract myself. And it almost worked. Almost.

But even then, I guess there were always times when I knew I was lying to myself. I knew you mattered more than I cared to admit. And a little while later, you came traipsing back into my life. We talked, we laughed, we hung out. You knew things no one knew about me. And I would like to believe I knew a little bit more of you than most. You were caring and supportive. You were easy to talk to, and above all, you understood. You understood things others couldn't. It wasn't long in terms of time, but as far as friendships go, you were already one of the most important. I suppose that's really the type of person you are.

You were all wrong for me. You were trouble. And I knew there was absolutely no way that I would ever mean anything to you in the romantic sense. I knew I needed to stop risking everything, I needed to guard myself, come back to my senses. Yes, I knew all of that.

Yet, for some reason, I couldn't. When I was around you, I just never stood a chance. I was the irrational fool again. I was silly and sensible, irresponsible and grown up - all at the same time. I knew I was in over my head, despite my reluctance to the idea of getting serious about any other person again. A year ago, when I was still getting over things, I never thought I'd love someone again in the foreseeable future.

And now, if it was possible, I loved you even more. 

I could've gotten over it. I could've broken off all contact and moved on with my life. It wouldn't have been easy but it was possible.

But I didn't want to. Even when I knew nothing would ever come out of it, nothing could ever happen between us. For a variety of reasons, the idea of 'us' just wasn't possible. 

Yet I didn't want to end it. I didn't want to finish whatever it was that we had. I wanted to risk it.

I liked the person I was around you. I like the person you've made me. I've had my dark moments, but every time I was with you, I was happy. Truly happy. I was smiling. Laughing again. Something inside felt alive once more. After a long long time, I was willing to take a chance and lay everything on the line. I knew it would hurt when it ended, perhaps more than before. But with you, it was worth it. 

I loved you. I loved you enough to take chances. Enough to watch you with another, and still be happy. Enough to be happy with just knowing that I loved you. Without any expectation in return.

And that was the deal. I allowed myself to feel that way about someone again, but I would never let myself expect anything in return.

At least I was mature in that sense. I always knew where I stood, and where you were. I knew that the time I had with you wouldn't last, and that I had to make the best of it. I knew not to take things for granted. All those moments I spent with you, I knew how important they were. How I had to memorize it all, for it would all come to an end before I realized. I was aware of the frailty of love, and the ruthlessness of time.

And I was mature enough to accept that. No amount of time I spent with you would ever be enough. When it was time to leave, I had to pick myself up and leave. I had to call it quits and say goodbye. I had to remember the promise I made to myself at the beginning -- no expectations. 

And now that it's over, that is what I keep reminding myself.

You opened my heart again. You made me realize that eventually, its possible to get over past hurt, and fall in love. You made me willing to take chances and believe in love. That is perhaps the reason why it all happened. The reason you walked into my life. And now, a little while later, walked out.

It wasn't long in terms of calendar months. But to me, it seems like an entire lifetime. I am a new person thanks to you.

I will always love you. And when I look around me, there are more than a few reminders of things that you said or did. But that's all there will be to it. Memories. Conversations I can play in my head. Moments that I can relive every time I close my eyes. 

You will move on, have a life of your own. One I never have and never will fit into. You'll find someone else who will make you feel the way I feel about you. And at the end, that's what I want for you. I don't have to be with you. It's enough for me to know that I love you.

Maybe I'll get over it, and in time find another hurricane that will sweep me off my feet, just like you did. Yet, all said and done, you are a person I will always remember fondly. Through a walk in the park during spring time, I'll imagine how it would be to have you beside me. What you would say or do. Or when the season's first snow falls, I'll imagine how it would be to share that moment with you. When candle light reflects off the stem of a wine glass, I'll see your deep brown eyes. And when I'm standing by the river on a moonlit night, I'll miss you.

Yes, I have to and I am, walking away, but I'll think about you. 
Every now and then, I'll think about you.

I Will Not Forget You

By Chelsea Fagan
|| Thought Catalog ||

"Time often passes by us in what feels like bursts of wind. It sweeps up everything around us in a kind of blind rush, moving and eroding patterns before we can catch our bearings. By the time it has passed — a month, a year, a relationship — it’s hard to even tell what has actually happened. And it isn’t until things have settled back down, into a place where they can be recognized and counted, that we start to feel the full weight of what has changed. Time with you was a burst of wind, and when I think of it, from memory alone I want to pull my sweater tighter around me.

I can’t say exactly what makes certain people more difficult than others, but there are undeniably those we love who refuse to fit into any shape we could possibly cut out for them. Their whole being seems frustrating, elusive, incompatible. And with you, there was always a palpable difficulty. I was a child again, playing with my wooden block toys, attempting to insert a triangle block into a square-shaped cut-out. It never fit, and yet I didn’t possess the perspective or the self-confidence to understand that the shapes simply didn’t coincide. For so long, I wondered what I was doing wrong, trying over and over again to make the impossible happen.

You taught me many things about myself, about what it means to love and care even in the face of cold indifference. There were glimpses of compassion and understanding, sure, but I have no doubts as to the dynamics of our interactions. I was always chasing, and you barely had to move to stay out of my reach. Those moments of affection, without which the whole ordeal would have seemed worthless, became like tiny flecks of gold found in near-endless piles of soot and rubble. If I could only keep digging, I thought, I would eventually uncover something beautiful — something I needed to believe existed between us.

I never did, of course. There was never a deeper level to our story than what you allowed on the surface. In that way, I admit that you were decent. You were up-front, and never explicitly promised more than you would ultimately be prepared to give. It was almost entirely me, weaving elaborate tapestries of double-speak and hidden meanings that spelled out only the things I wanted to hear. There was nothing I couldn’t misinterpret for my own desire, my own need to be needed by someone in whom I invested so deeply.

But the wind blew past us, the summer over more quickly than I’d ever seen one go before. There was a moment we were sitting on a porch, listening to cicadas and talking about keeping in touch, and then it was gone. Our hands were touching, and then they weren’t. If I had known that moment would be over so soon, I would have probably said goodbye then. I would have liked to go out with a little dignity, a little closure — not drawn out over months of barely speaking, of me attaining perpetually higher limits of humiliation in my refusal to accept the truth. To have confronted your unavailability head-on would have been a ripping off of the emotional band-aid, one I only thought I wanted to spend the cool autumn months gently tugging at.

We didn’t speak; we didn’t keep in touch. For a long time, I remained convinced that this period of distance was a strange emotional coma from which you would suddenly awake. You would tell me that you were sorry to have been so weird, that you had always loved me, that I had always been right. I suppose I have watched enough movies in my life to believe that no story, if unsatisfying, is ever at its very end. The tiny flame of hope that this may all have been a petulant phase in your otherwise limitless capacity for love and understanding was perhaps more painful than the harsh finality of your disinterest. To keep grasping at ever-slimmer chances of a happy ending was frustrating, and then ridiculous, and then profoundly sad. I would have liked to just go straight to sad.

After our time flew past me, the passing of months and years became more soft, more understandable. Time once again resembled the lazy river that it had always been, not catching me in its refusal to slow down and let me breathe. The months turned into years, and every last bit of dust from our strange little hurricane had settled. My thoughts of us had become — have become — tiny vignettes that pass in front of my eyes only when faced with a direct reference to you. And they no longer carry a sting, or a turn of the stomach, or even a remote desire to reach out. Life is better (as I had always imagined it might be) when I am surrounded by people of whose love I am completely sure.

I will not forget you, though. I don’t think that you particularly deserve my memory, nor do I flatter myself into believing that you return my sense of vague wistfulness. There is no part of me that wants to return to the limbo I existed in for so long, or even the often-imagined parallel universe in which you reciprocated my feelings to the letter. I do, however, want to remember what it feels like to be hurt, to want, to need something so desperately only to find out that your life is perfectly fine without it. As much as the little scar on my knee will always remind me to watch out when I am running, yours on my heart will teach me to be kind. Because I know what it feels like to be cast aside with indifference, and I know that it’s a pain from which the body itself takes a long time to recover. You will live in my mind as a cautionary tale, a fable of how much damage words can do — especially when they are insincere. And though I am not nostalgic for what we did have, I am hopeful about life being filled with everything we didn’t."

The original article can be found here:

http://thoughtcatalog.com/2012/i-will-not-forget-you/