this is a short epilogue; our last conversation, though i confess i no longer feel any urgency to tell him what it did to me, since i have come to understand, slowly and with relief, that he does not care to know.

“soulmate”, “the one true love”

those words don’t mean anything in my life. yet i was not the one who spat them out to the world to hear.

but there it was, the whole of it, said so simply that it took me a moment to feel the weight of it land. he knew too much, he said, as though knowledge were a debt, as though the person i had been was a sentence i could never finish serving. i did not argue. 

i have found, since then, that there is a particular kind of grief that does not ask to be spoken aloud, that does not even ask to be understood by the one who caused it. it simply asks to be carried a while, quietly, until it grows lighter on its own, or until it doesn’t. i have decided not to tell him what those words did to me. not out of pride, exactly, though perhaps a little of that too, but because i understand now that telling him would change nothing. a man who cannot look past history is not waiting to be convinced; he has already decided, and all that is left for me is to walk on without saying anything further.

i am again reminded that i have since discovered something i did not have years ago, though i searched for it without knowing what i was searching for: i have found people who love me deeply and truly, as i am, history and all, without conditions attached like small print to the bottom of a promise. what’s to say about his character flaws? so beside a love like that, i find i have no appetite left for chasing what could be. let him keep his history, and his hesitation, and his careful accounting of my journeys. 

there goes the answer 

i realised i do not want any of this. i used to say he could always find a friend in me, but now there is none.