When We Were

by Diana Elliot Graham

To anyone who thinks they need closure, it’s not found anywhere outside of yourself. To anyone who thinks they need control, I promise you already have it.

Oh, to see through the eyes of a romance novelist.

His initial response shocked me; his follow up paralyzed me. And now I am flooded with the doubt that bringing up our romantic relationship wasn’t wise. We had never directly discussed it. We had never indirectly discussed it. Not until enough time had passed and we started more seriously dating other people, at which point we would casually throw out an inquiry, a litmus test to ensure our boundaries were still firmly in place. They always were.

I’d be lying to myself to say I didn’t also think about him. About his message. But I shook away the distraction, knowing I hadn’t come up with anything to say in response to his ‘but-I-didn’t-dump-you’ text, and he didn’t seem to have anything else to say either. So we left it where we leave all of our history. In the past.

I am taking this trip down memory lane because I know you have no ulterior motive, and now I am interested to know how we ended up with different understandings of what happened. Dredging up old love can be a slippery slope, and in all the years since, we’ve preserved this friendship by staying away from that edge.

We have known each other a long time, and I have no regrets about where we ended up.

I laugh far more than I ever actually mean to. Nothing is ever as funny as the frequency of giggles, chuckles, or faked hysterics truly implies. Paired with a shrug, I’ve offered up this stranger a taste of validation and indifference in one interaction. Now, to seal the deal, deliver the wit and tease that keeps people wanting more.

I can never clear it out long enough to truly relax. Instead, the closest I can get is a controlled rest. Shelving away the stresses of the day, the expectations of my life, and instead letting myself fall into someone else’s life, one that exists between the pages of a book.

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

I am happy now. In ways most people search for well into their middle age. More than happy, I am content. Happiness, I had always been able to find. Even then. Be it for a night, or longer. I could find it in a man, a book, a game. But eventually, I found it in myself. The peace that comes from being content? That’s always been harder to find, let alone accept.

Reid and I met for coffee every morning for almost two weeks. Each day, we shared more about ourselves, every day getting harder and harder to leave the small table by the window. He asked about me in a way people usually didn’t. He seemed interested in the layered parts of me, not just what was outwardly facing, and he didn’t hold back in repaying the truths with his own. There was something special about this morning coffee ritual. What was building between us, what brewed each morning, was a lot more than coffee.

But I learned a long time ago that you can miss something without wanting it back. Knowing that what you miss is just the memory. The version we preserve to protect the imprint of something, or someone, important.”

We won’t be who we were when we were them. Who we were when we were happy in the blissful ignorance of ‘young love’ or whatever it is people say to be cliché. Whatever it is, people call it to make you feel like you’re under a common spell and prepare you for the idea that it isn’t permanent in any way that matters. And you aren’t unique for experiencing it.

We won’t be who we were. But we will both be who we should.