The day I let her walk away
By: Johann Letzte
Tags: Life Lessons, Prose, Love, Heartbreak, Intimately Intricate

Seemed Track Threshold Train Soft Travel Railway (Pixabay)

I let her walk away three times. The first time, she chose doing so. But I chose to suffer myself with the other two.

I remember seeing her face as I walked away and closed the door behind me. I turned away from her as I closed the door behind me. We didn’t have to talk. She looked me in the eye and knew exactly what was happening. I had to go. Time and fate had been cruel to both of us. I learned that day that sometimes one cannot do whatever they want. That sometimes we have to deal with the consequences of our actions. Choosing means renouncing. And by leaving her I thought I was doing the lesser of two evils.

It took us ten years to be together. She didn’t want me at first, and that’s solely on her. I still hear her voice saying: “if you only were more good looking…”. It hurt like hell back then. Honestly, I should have just left her on that moment. But I didn’t. I became a hostage of the moments that led us to that encounter. I tried to kiss her on that prom night. She dodged me and said that “something happened”. Ten years after she blamed it on being young, immature.

She haunted me. Her memory haunted me. Much of my self-image was in shambles because of that single comment. Even though we lost contact after high school, I was the one who went after her two more times. So it took me completely by surprise when she came back from London that she would even take her time to invite me to a party. From then on we started talking again.

And as the things went forward, I told her about everything that happened since we lost touch. Somehow, we connected once again. It didn’t take long for us to confess how we were in each other’s minds. We had to be together. And so we did.

I remember her leaving the gate of the airport. I saw her and went straight for her arms. I held her tight and kissed her on the lips with passion. It was really weird to kiss a woman you met in your teens as an adult, and for the first time, in an airport lobby. She confessed later that she was unsure if I would want her. As if I would be so vindictive to lure her in just to dismiss her. The thought never crossed my mind. I loved her for ten years. Everything that happened in between was a proxy. Or so I thought.

We had a mini honeymoon of sorts. And so we decided: we are together now. But there was a caveat to the plan: she was still living 2,000km away and had a previous relationship to work out. She was not misled, not at all. She was fully aware before she started talking to me. The thing was that I was living alone. I was, in fact, feeling alone, aside from being alone. But the other woman had made plans, left her job, and was in the process of moving in with me.

I felt a terrible agony. What should I do? Dump the woman I waited ten years to be together or just hold my word to the woman that employed all of her efforts to accompany me and make me succeed? I couldn’t decide. Wisely enough, when she was with me, she didn’t ask me to decide on the moment. Who knows what I would have done.

But time passed and the day of the move was inching every day closer and closer. So we decided to meet once more. And it was as perfect as it could possibly be. That was it. I imagined myself with her. But on the other side, what would the other woman do? Without a job, without a boyfriend, in a new city, without a house? No, that could not be done. I couldn’t be like that. My hands shake from remembering the scene. It is absurdly hard to type this part of the story. What I did took every ounce of strength I had in me: I got up from the bed, got my backpack and told her: “I have to go”. She glanced at me and didn’t say a word. She understood everything. She knew back then what it meant.

We wouldn’t talk or see each other for at least two more years. We unfortunately had people in common that loved to put us together. If they only knew the damage they were doing. I tried my best to be the best husband I could. I tried to make the woman that became my wife as happy as she could be. But the shadow wouldn’t leave. Not until I buried it.

At some point we agreed to meet. I was on a business trip in our hometown, and we agreed to have a dinner. She revealed that in the moments following the one that I left, she was told that her grandmother had passed away. She quoted me: “grandparents are fragile creatures”. I felt terrible.

She asked me why. I am sure that somewhere inside her, she just knew. But she deserved to hear from me. So I told her: “I decided to fulfil my end of the responsibility in detriment of my own happiness”. She nodded and grabbed my hand: “Are you happy now?”. I told her that I preferred not to answer. She understood once more. There wasn’t need for words. Looking in hindsight, it is one of the things that made her special.

As I understood that I was holding her back, and in many ways, keeping me grounded on her memory, I just let her go. Never emailed her again, didn’t text, anything. Excluded her contacts from everything I had. She needed to be free of me and I from her. It would be another eight years until I heard from her again.

When my high school colleagues threw a 20 years’ reunion party I showed up divorced with two kids. That is not the image I envisioned, for sure. Therapy was helping me to deal with a new relationship that was (and still is) taking the best of me, with the failed marriage, with the prospect of living away from two sons. That’s when I met with a former colleague that was a friend with common with her. She was thrilled to see me, and we talked about what happened ever since. At some point, she asked me: “you remember her, right? We see each other very often”. As if I didn’t know. She then asked me to take a photograph with her, the four of us. I immediately assumed that she was going to send her. Some gleam of hope lit up in me.

Throughout the years, there were many times when I thought about meeting her again, and who knows, that we would be together again. I always told myself that I wouldn’t get in her way. That only if she came after me, and if the conditions were perfect, that only then I would allow myself to dream about it. One cannot ruin another’s person life without thought. I had done that once, to two people. Not again.

But I couldn’t resist. I finally accepted her second invitation on Facebook. That’s when I found out that she was seeing someone. “Maybe they are not that serious”. A few days later her then boyfriend would post her ultrasound exams with a baby boy. Quite fitting, I thought. A couple of days after that they would update their status to married. Why I felt so bothered is hard to tell. But it was gut wrenching, heart wrenching. As if this was the final chapter of the story, the bitter end where the two main protagonists don’t stay together. I guess not every tale has a happy ending. As the song said: “All this time you were pretending, so much for my happy ending”. And then, as the credits rolled, she walked away for one last time.