My phone buzzed twice on the coffee table. It was April 15th, a gray and humid day in the city. Memories rushed back in that moment as I watched life move on from my window.
It was exactly a year I ended my somewhat relationship with Tristan, a boy I'd loved since high school. He had became a man, a good looking one and I yearned for what could have been.
Did we have the chance to pursue what we felt, you ask? Twice he had asked to be more than friends but I turned him down out of a misguided sense of doing the right thing. In high school, I didn't want any distractions from attaining the envied place of valedictorian. He was very proud of me and that feeling was satisfying.
I didn't want to lose his friendship. What if we had crossed the line from platonic to something intimate, would we still have shared our good and bad, joys and sorrows freely? Or would we have lost the one thing that mattered most—each other? I doubted and sought to play safe, so I turned him down a second time when he travelled across five states to be with me.
The parting was painful and even more so as our friendship suffered. We didn't speak as much on the phone, the distance weighing on our hearts like a rock stuck inside a power pipe, steadily building up a pressure that almost tore me apart from the inside.
When I felt I was ready after graduation, I travelled back home to a most shocking news. Tristan was happily married with a baby on the way.
A week holed up in my room did nothing to ease my pain or quiet the regret. My heart felt utterly broken and my tears fell unceasing when my mother piled the fault at my feet in stacked boxes of fear, doubt and selfishness.
And you know what? I liked the way the pain felt. I'd found acceptance in my reality, a world I shaped through my selfishness and confusion. I'd foolishly imagined a perfect world where life happened at a chosen timing but I lost the perspective that the timing wasn't mine to choose. I didn't possess that power—fate did and all I could do was meet it with the choices placed before me.
What Tristan and I had was real but never meant to be because we didn't commit to it. Or at least, I did not.
I hope you enjoyed reading this short piece. It's inspired by the Freewrite #dailyprompt phrase "found acceptance”.
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