When We Were

by Diana Elliot Graham

I don’t regret where we ended up. Keeping in touch over the years. Our friendship. But this idea that she had any doubt about how I felt? That I regret.

I believed what I said, that it was different now. Any feelings left are just those of friendship. But I think now, for the first in all these years, one, or both of us, felt regret.

“We’ve been friends far longer than we were ever anything else, this is just that, us being friends.”

“Yeah. I loved him. Whatever that even meant to me back then. Whoever I was... yeah, I loved him.” I take a slow steading breath as I think about it. “I just don’t think I always made it easy for him to love me.”

I’m not that person anymore, and looking back, retelling this story from the beginning, made me wonder how much of that was because of him. Eventually getting to a place where I no longer needed the external superficial validation and finding freeing peace within the silence. The only expectations to live up to—my own.

Whatever he’s feeling, if he’s feeling, it’s just the memory of the short-lived romantic part of our relationship, the old intimacies. He’s not feeling anything real, nothing current, and I think he knows that. I know that.”

We didn’t just end up on different sides that night, we ended up on different sides of the country, different sides of our lives.

The more he drank, the bolder he got. His confidence while sober was replaced by alcohol induced confidence when drunk.

Asshole

“It’s a reminder how quickly you can wake up and everything is different.”

turned out to be a foreshadowing

“No matter how much I want to know what you wrote, I don’t expect any part of you that you don’t want to share.”

Owww sweet

I realize that he’s drawing a clear line and setting an expectation immediately. It has nothing to do with me, but what he wants for himself, what he feels he deserves.

Smart.

He wears his emotions, we are different in that way, but something about being around him makes me want to lower that guard just enough that he felt it was an even exchange, not just a reflection.

There is something about his sincerity, and assuredness, that makes it clear he feels he can be exactly who he is without regret, and it’s contagious.

“Arden, this has been great, but I meant what I said. I don’t want to get involved in something messy. That’s just not who I am, and that’s not what I’m looking for. If there’s something going on there, I understand it, I respect it, but I respect myself enough not to get involved in it.”

God i love you for such mindset

If I am myself, what’s there to be embarrassed about, or even regret?”

I love him more and more

it seemed out of character that he wouldn’t. Or at least the character I thought he had.

Where is your trust in him

The main character, a first draft to the main character now. Who I am as I sit here, so different from who I was when he was him. When we were together.

Looking at us, at them, they had no idea what was going to happen. How hard they would fall in love. She had no idea how much she would change because of it. But looking at us so much younger than we are now, I can see it. She was enchanted, I was enchanted.

we both effectively walked away and didn’t challenge the other to stay.

“There isn’t anything wrong with ambition, but you shouldn’t let the ambitions of other people prevent you from enjoying your life now.”

Deep

I ignored a lot of signs because I was more focused on preserving what I thought was just friendship.”

you seem really happy, but he would shatter that happiness in a goddamn second if it meant he was the one who could put it back together.

no matter what actually happened, we both walked away.

The truth though, the more I’ve thought about it, there might never have been the happy ending for us that she now has. The one she found not long after we broke up.

Looking at her now, she seems more than content in her life, and I know I am more than content in mine.

don't truly believe him

Because as much as I want to have this conversation, I should have pushed for it the day it happened, even a week later. Not now.

“Arden, the only apologies owed to either of us, are from the idiots we were all those years ago. Because that’s the thing that trips me up. That I’ve been thinking about constantly. That’s why I replayed it all. That no matter how much we loved each other, and I know we did, we left each other.

“I didn’t let you leave because I didn’t care, I let you leave because I did. Because I thought that’s what you wanted. Damn, it sounds so cliché to say, so stupid to hear myself say it. But that doesn’t make it less true.”

I’m filled with so much self-doubt while he looks at me dripping with self-assurance.

Wrong people wrong time

I know who I am, I know what I want. I wanted you, but I told you if you didn’t want a relationship, that was fine. I’m not going to compromise myself or my dignity to chase after someone who doesn’t want to be with me, and right now it looks like that’s what I’m doing.

The difference between us is that while he says things he means, I say things I don’t.

“Arden, please, tell me. I need you to tell me what you want from me.” “I want you and I want to be clear that this is over. But I want us to have closure.”

I’m not going to chase someone who doesn’t want to be chased.

I let my mind get the better of me, let myself get swept away in dangerous expectations and thoughts, and you let the hard lines you draw keep you square in a box. I don’t think I had realized I had any of those fears, about us, or our future, and I let other people get into my head. I was in denial. I spent a long time in denial. Ignoring what was right in front of me.”

“Who are you calling?” He slips the phone from my hand, not that I have a good grip on it anyway, and laughs when he looks at the screen. Sliding it into his back pocket with a shake of his head.

Always there piece of sh

I apologize for the fact that even sitting here, despite what I said, about us being better off, about being happy as we are, I feel like I’m fucking twenty-two all over again, ready to pull you into my arms, to throw you over my shoulder. I can still see the future that we could have had if I stayed. The one you currently have.”

Because there should have been no room for miscommunication. It should have been clear that in whatever I said, you wouldn’t be able to think it meant anything but I love you, because I really did love you. There should have been no reality where you looked at me and doubted that. Where you looked at me and thought I didn’t know you, didn’t try to know you. Where you were in my bed one night and running from it the next. Where I was clouded by my pride.

A good man would have chased you, fought for you. God, I should have fucking protected you.

We both know we have embers left in the ashes. We can either stoke them, feed them the oxygen they need to grow into flames again, knowing that that fire would burn down the lives we’ve made, or we could suffocate them. Instead, taking the deep breaths we need to fill our own lungs with air and allow ourselves to breathe.

“I used to think that maybe you were just the right person but at the wrong time. You know? Like maybe there would be a time for us. That there would be other chapters, but you would eventually be my epilogue. But I was wrong. I think you were the right person, at the right time, and we can blame the miscommunication trope all we want, but like you said, none of it was enough. So you were right, Reid. While things might have been different between us, they wouldn’t have been better.