There is nothing more challenging than to make yourself stop loving someone. When you've spent two years of your life building a relationship that is unique, the end can be cataclysmic.
It's like a solar flare, or a nuclear explosion. Anything in its wake is obliterated. Everything you knew, who you were, and the things you cherished. Those parts of you were intertwined with him. Life was about 'us' and 'we'; selfless . . . sacrificing . . . compromising.
It is at the moment of separation that you realize how dependent on each other you have become—how much you want to hear his voice and feel his hands on your face—and you know that it must end because of this.
When you've become dependent on a man who is neither selfless nor compromising; who is never tender or gentle; who does not take into account your wants and needs in his daily life as you do his; and who demands to know your every plan and who you will be spending time with, it is time to let it go.
Two years isn't a long time, but if you've fallen in and out of and back into love, and gone through hell for each other, it seems an eternity indeed. Ages upon ages of building and tearing down, redesigning and rethinking the future are lost in a day, an hour, a moment.
Tears—hot, fat, angry tears—fill your eyes and he says not to bother, that he knows your tricks and this is just another guilt trip. And you cry. He lights a Marlboro and sneers.
He isn't the man you fell for then. Your dreams and aspirations are shattered as a snow globe on a granite floor. Crystalline pieces of your heart are scattered, never to be recalled. He had dreams too, he says. He loved you once, but you're too difficult; too picky. You wanted him to be something he's not. He's only doing what makes him happy.
Is this what happiness is, then: drugs, sex, and life in the basement of a derelict house? He's a lost little boy without a soul, without a care, because he can't care. He doesn't know the day, or the time, or what will happen next. He calls it adventure; he calls it spontaneity. But all it is is the black hole of his desensitization taking the rest of his life; taking his future.
Strung out on pot and hallucinogenic pills, his head droops a little. He pats the place next to him on the bed, inviting you to sit. You shake your head, and for the last time, leave his house. You leave his life.
That isn't the man you fell in love with so long ago. That isn't even a man.