When We Were

by Diana Elliot Graham

there’s nothing weird about you being young and dating or fucking or doing whatever it is you want. These are our best boob years, and we should get full use of them.”

There must be something so liberating just existing as your honest self.

By nature, I was a grudge holder. By practice, I tried to be better. It was always a great struggle to subdue the parts of me that wanted to be more volatile. Knowing there was no benefit to it, not really.

It wasn’t the thrill or challenge he was after nor the prize. It was the knowledge, the learning. He wanted to know me, not win me.

I won’t wrap myself in the comfort of illusions. No. I am not the person who dilutes themselves into a false reality. The reality is, she left.

game of tug-of-war that tied us together is over. I’ve won. The verbal volleyball won’t be lobbed across the net anymore. And if it is, I won’t pick it up.

“Better than you, Reid? That’s really what you think? There was no one better than you.”

Maybe we only know each other through Instagram posts, and a random coffee every few years, but ‘who you were,’ who you were for me,” I say, repeating back the phrase he used with intentional emphasis. “You were the best.”

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.”

“Closure?” The sound that punctuates that question isn’t a laugh. “Haven’t you realized by now... you and me? There’s no closure for us, for this. There wasn’t then, and there isn’t now. We can only choose to accept it. Everything that happened between us, after us. All the time that’s passed, I didn’t know what I was missing. It was you. It was all of this.

“It’s not about us being together now, but I’m here because I needed you to understand, without a shadow of a doubt, how I felt about you when we were.

need you to understand how I felt. How I still feel, in many ways. So, Arden, while there might never be closure for us, finally, there can be understanding.”

I needed her to know that despite everything. She was the love of my life, the love of that life. The one that existed in my small apartment and the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The young love that made me feel bold, and terrified, that left me ripped in two when she left. And when she did leave, when I made her leave, when we ended up with this twisted painful understanding refusing to meet in the middle, I forced myself to close that book and start a new one. But even forcing it closed didn’t wholly erase the story from memory.

For me, I thawed in winter. Warmed in ways I hadn’t expected. Layers of ice melting, evaporating overtime. Only to refreeze when everyone else shed their coats.

Then, it’s over. We won’t be who we were when we were them.

“I had hoped you would look back and know that what we had wasn’t common. It wasn’t just young love meant to burn hot and burn out.

“One.” He holds up a finger, and lets the soft smile pull on his lips. “I loved you.” “Two.” He extends a second finger, and the smile falls flat. “Not enough.”

all I can see is her then.

“You were the love of my life also.”

I pull her back in for one more hug, because in some ways this feels like the ending we never got.