IV.I.VI – The Blackest Day
IV.I.VI
THE BLACKEST DAY
Three words; “I love you”. Just three words. Three words so simple that they’re usually part of an infant’s jargon. Put a monkey on a typewrite and it’s bound to spell them out eventually. Three simple words.
I’ve been known to speak at an alarming rate of WPMs. I’m talking Lorelai Gilmore or someone who’s on coke kinda fast. It’s the coffee and the who I am as a person that makes it possible, even though it must break like five different laws of physics. I also choose to think that I’m rather eloquent – perhaps not quite as Shakespearean as I might think I am, though eloquent enough. Turns out, it only takes those three words to stump me and my conversational skills.
There I lay on the couch, surrounded by his warm embrace, feeling safe and warm. It was the perfect moment. Yet somehow, for the life of me, I just couldn’t get them out. And I had no idea why. Maybe it was my pride, my hubris, once again. Maybe I was subconsciously trying to mash it all down and pretend as if I didn’t feel that way. To love is to be vulnerable and to be vulnerable is to allow yourself to get hurt. Maybe my subconscious didn’t think love trumped pain. Maybe it was trying to protect me. I have no idea. All I knew was that I really did love him.
I let the moment pass. We’d get there eventually anyways. Plus, he had always been the one to make the first move. He was the one who had asked me out. He was the one who wanted us to be exclusive. And so it only made sense that he’d take this step first as well. It was actually better this way, I’d be off the hook.
It was a few days later when he sent me a text saying he wanted to discuss something face to face. He knew I hated having big moments over the phone so it was just him being considerate.
“He’s gonna say it and finally it will be out in the open”. I could already picture myself being with him. Really being with him – something I never got to do with Pedro. I’d introduce him to my friends, we’d start sharing more of our lives together, hell, I’d probably move in with him at some point. We’d be the new power couple everyone would talk about. Nay, we’d be the power couple everyone would be jealous of. I was sure of it. So sure that I wanted to hear it right there and then. And so I gave him a free pass to say whatever he wanted over text. And there it was…
Time stopped. I didn’t cry or break down or yell or scream. I was deadened by that one text. Disappointed doesn’t even begin to cut it. There I was, a few seconds before, expecting to see the three words that I myself had been repeating over and over in my head for days on end, and what I get is the complete opposite. I stared blankly at my phone for what felt like an eternity, unable to make sense of anything.
And then it sank in. The fact that those three words would forever go unspoken, let alone be reciprocated. For the first time in my life I found myself heart-broken. I composed myself and tried to think about what he meant by ‘no connection’. We clicked. We clicked on so many levels. Our taste in music, literature, fashion, film. And the sex. Oh god, the sex. It was most passionate sex we had ever experienced – the both of us. And then… And then… That’s when I realised we barely had anything else in common. I realised I barely knew him. I also realised he knew nothing about me.
He knew I studied medicine and that it’s my passion. We never really discussed anything about it though. He never really asked about it. Come to think of it, he never asked me anything about myself apart from the superficial. He never asked about my family – how a piece of me had died along with my dad. How dysfunctional my relationship with my mother and brother is. He never asked me about my ambitions – how badly I wanted to become a neurosurgeon and the struggle I faced with also wanting to travel all over the world.
How could I have possibly not seen it coming? I never felt as naïve and I certainly had never been as blindsided as I felt there and then. I felt pathetic. I needed some perspective. Was our relationship all made up in my head? Was I so caught up in the lust of it all that I didn’t notice it was all superficial? That the chemistry was purely physical? Did I make it out to be something it never was nor could ever be? And how did I manage to turn from emotionally-stunted to fully-invested in a heartbeat?
Heart-break and disappointment made way for logic and also pride and hubris once again. I told him I felt the same, that our chemistry was indeed hard to come by, but it was all physical, and clearly that would never be enough. It was all still fun and exciting at this stage, but it was in no way sustainable. And that’s how we decided to end things.
Over the following couple of days, I grieved the end of our relationship. However short and possibly insignificant it might have been, my love for him was real. And I had to grieve that loss – the loss of what we were and what we could have been. It might not have been my first break up, sure, but it was the first time I had been dumped. What followed was the classic post-break up breakdown – junk food, sad songs, This is Us and an endless tirade of wallowing.
When I eventually started to move on, there was still something that I couldn’t quite get over. Could – or rather should… Should I have fought harder? And if yes, why didn’t I? Was it my damned pride once again? Shame? Hopelessness? I wasn’t really and truly ready to end things, but I let them end either way. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him it might have been more than sex for me. I also couldn’t bring myself to tell him I loved him. What the hell was it that was holding me back? All my life I had been one of the most outspoken people I’ve ever known; always direct and straight to the point, and now I found myself unable to speak my mind. I couldn’t tell him I loved him and now I couldn’t tell him I wanted to try harder.
I swore to myself I’d never put myself in that position ever again. Looking back, I don’t regret how things ended. Short as that relationship might have been, it taught me how important it is to just spit it out when you feel so strongly about something. It taught me to not let life just happen. It taught me to fight hard for the things that matter. You were right Mark Sloan, you were right.