It’s been six years but when I look back I feel like the emotions I felt are blurred into what I feel right now. Like watercolors on wet paper, they blend and blur and merge to create something else. People replaced him and feelings changed. I grew up. But before that I had to let myself be set on fire. I had to burn until there was nothing left of me. Until I was a pile of ashes and I was in a pit so deep and dark that I was sure I was going blind. I had an image in my head and it took over my thoughts and body and senses, so much so that when I was rejected I found that he was the one who’d set me on fire and walked away. I screamed and screamed and cried until I was dead.



And then I rose from the ashes and realized that all those days had passed, and I’d been telling myself that I could change someone I didn’t even really know. I thought that if you love someone it was enough to just tell them. I told myself that I was allowed to pretend like I could relate to all those sappy love songs and quotes and Facebook statuses. I thought I saw the signs and that was enough to fulfill the emotions that I believed I was feeling. But to him, the only real feelings were lust and infatuation. He’d decided that at the beginning, and maybe that was the problem. Because I saw the good and saw the good and then I was left in the cold with no light to help me home. There was no one to tell me how to understand that not everyone is going to like you as much as you like them. It’s never a good idea to agree to everything someone says, and it’s never a good idea to constantly be available. When you do that, people think they can come and go, and you’ll be fine with it. You don’t have the right to get angry or cause a fight because you just got what you asked for. And I don’t know what I expected-my imagination ran wild, I guess. 


I believed that he’d be there to meet me halfway, like Marina and Ulay, except in that walk, they just realized how their differences meant that they couldn’t be together. And in my story, we weren’t lovers. Friends? Maybe. Best friends? I don’t know. Can you become best friends with someone in a span of two or three months? What if you’ve never spent time with them in person? What if all you have is your imagination? Imagination of what he looked like as he typed responses to me, as he recorded little voice messages, as he chose what photos of his dog to send me and what information about himself to share with me. But your imagination can be wrong, and your imagination can merge with fantasy so much so that you forget the reality of it all. 


And there was so much reality I’d scooped out of this relationship, so many flaws and facts that I threw into the trash the way you’d throw ground coffee after hours brewing in the fridge-cold brew, deep and rich and bitter as ever. Wet and darker than they originally were, the coffee grounds are not reusable, and when I fell in love with him I decided that I would take the whole bag of reality and facts and throw it straight into the trash. I refused to even use them. They weren’t a part of the concoction that was our relationship. But then something happened. Something I had hoped wouldn’t happen. It made sense to blindly support him at the time. Pity and the need to understand pushed me to be ever so accepting of the one thing I hadn’t wanted him to say. Scarred by the past, and clearly unwilling to let it go, he wasn’t ready for a relationship. But I was. I wanted to grab his hands and dive headfirst into the water, and I didn’t care if we drowned. We’d hold each other while we drowned and that would be enough, and that thought alone made me fall even more. 


I could have been his anchor. 

I could’ve been his destiny. 

But we all know that’s not how the story ended.