The problem with saving broken people is you only get one chance. It's a lifetime commitment. Every break up, rejection, dismissal, you break a little inside. Your heart is never the same, you close off just a little bit more. Sometimes, you start off damaged. Something happens to you in your youth, and ruins the innocence and wholeness of your soul. Sometimes someone comes along and saves you, slowly sticking back together all the broken pieces of you.
Aunt Nola and Uncle Gerald used to tell me their story when I was younger. Aunt Nola was damaged when she met Gerald, there was no doubt about that. 10 years younger than mum, she was much more affected by her parents divorcing when she was just 7, and her teenage years were spent watching her mother fall in love
too easily only to be rejected, cheated, or abused every single time. It was no wonder she didn't believe in love. She became a solitary person, focused on her career, and incredibly distrustful of any guy who showed interest. That was when Gerald came along, and through persistence, slowly got her to let down her walls, and they fell in love.
It was the story of fairytales. I dreamt of my own epic romance, me swooping in, a prince with a feather in my cap, saving my own beautiful, lost princess. Of course, I didn't know I was gay back then. Theirs was the story that introduced my own obsession with romantic cliches.
Until one day, I was 12, it ended. I'm still not sure of the specifics, but Gerald no longer felt the passion and love that had guided their relationship in the past. So he ended it. No one blames him, he's a nice guy, and he still cared, but it wasn't fair to her or himself to be trapped in an unsatisfying relationship.
But Aunt Nola was never the same afterwards. Those pieces of her heart that had been painstakingly glued back together again shattered once more, into tiny, irreparable pieces. She no longer visited as often, and when she did, she sat with a kind of despair that nothing could draw her out of. She'd lost all hope. A month later, she ended her life.
That was the most important lesson I've ever learnt about love. Not about finding it, or keeping it, but surviving it. If you're trying to save someone who's already broken, you only get that one chance.
And that is why I didn't take that chance. I can't deal with that commitment, that responsibility over someone else's life. I don't know what's going to happen, whether it's going to last, whether he'll be strong enough to survive it.
I know I'll always remember that look in his eyes, pleading with me to give him a chance, and my own cruel, almost heartless reply, "That means nothing to me.", knowing the alternative could be so much worse. This way he may survive.
They say, "It's better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all". I disagree.