Sometimes A Love Story Is Better Left Unfinished

If I could go back and start over with you, I wouldn’t. Because everything between us happened just as it should have. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t make me sad.

I remember seeing you for the first time when we were children. You were the strangest little boy I’d ever met. Your hair was wild and you had these thick glasses.

But still, I thought you were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. It was easy to fall in love with you. I fell quickly and hard and stayed that way for nearly two thirds of my life.

But timing was never our forte.

You had a girlfriend and then I had a boyfriend, then you’d be single and I’d live in another country, then I’d come back and find you’d gotten engaged, and you’d break it off and I’d be off on another adventure again.

But timing worked out in our favor for just a moment. Just once. And I really thought it was our moment. Finally.

But it wasn’t. It never would be. That fact became so clear. You treated me like I was anyone else. Like we hadn’t known each other our entire lives. Like I was just some girl that lived in your phone that you could taunt when you were bored.

But still, I think about you sometimes and wonder if you were it for me.

Because still, I miss you.

Still, I’d accept your apology.

Still, I compare everyone else to you.

Because when we were young, I wanted everything from you. But at the time I didn’t know it was I who would be giving up everything – my time, my self-esteem, my sleep, my peace, my life – for you.

I don’t even know if it’s forever that I wanted with you. I just wanted to spend a little time with you. Maybe just a day. Maybe even a few days until eventually all the time added up and their sum equalled a lifetime.

It’s been a few years since we’ve spoken and I’d like to say that I’m over it. But how could I be? We never got the chance to be together. I didn’t get the chance to date you and fall in love with you and find out all of your flaws so that when we inevitably broke up, I could hate you.

All I have is what could have been. All I have is memories of you when we were innocent, when we were best friends, when you kissed me on the playground and made me fall in love for the first and only time in my life. I have imperfect memories made perfect by the passage of time. I have a piece of our story, just the teaser, with no promise of an ending or a resolution. But if I could go back and rearrange the stars and implore the cosmos to rewrite our story, I wouldn’t. Because our minds create for us the worlds that our hands are unable to, and my dream of you is too sweet for it to ever come to pass.