QuoteQuest: Never Really Gone

It will always be a mystery to me how we can’t forget the love that forgot us.

jm storm

It’s been ten years, and yet it still doesn’t feel like she’s gone. Every now and again, it feels like she’s still here – about to walk through the door, or maybe she’s in the bed sucking her thumb, or calling me, asking to be read a story. My love right now reminds me of her, and although she is very different in many ways, if you twisted my arm, that may be why I was attracted to her in the first place.

Many people weren’t sure what to make of her. Lots of people saw a short, angry girl with temper issues and an unchecked violent side; while I can see their point, I saw something else in her: someone both intelligent and attractive, frustrated by social protocol and a world that was holding her back.

Sometimes things remind me of her. I have very vivid, unpleasant memories of her doing things that she knew would upset me, and then getting angry at me for being upset. Sometimes she would tell me she didn’t care, or that she was ashamed of me, or that there was something about me that she found unattractive. She told me to “man up”, even though I hate that phrase.

The bad things – the things that hurt, the unresolved, unexplained things that still leave a mark – come to me in my dark moments. At night, when I can’t sleep, I think of things she said to me. I sometimes let out a silent scream into the unforgiving night; I don’t deserve this, I tell myself, so why does it bother me?

When I dream, I often dream of her. In those dreams, we are still together. We’re probably still in our twenties. In nearly every dream, she is cheating, and gleeful about it. I scream and cry and panic, but she just giggles as she skips away to have sex with someone else. In life, the memories make me hurt. In dreams, the hurt comes from any number of hypothetical situations.

I wonder, sometimes, if she feels the same way about me, whether she acknowledges the intricacies and vague lack of explanation that happened at so many points in our love. Once, I asked her if there was anything without closure for her; she said there wasn’t anything. The same couldn’t be said for me, and for ten years, it has been the lack of a why that haunts me. I may not be a logical person, but I need a reason.

I’ll never get one.

Whether or not I’m forgotten, I don’t know. She moved on to something she always wanted, which I couldn’t give her – she married a Dutchman, got the job she wanted and even had a son. She has, in layman’s terms, a normal life, and that’s something she was striving for. Knowing her, I’m very much of the opinion that she has Completely Moved On, and that if I am in her life, I am little more than a faint echo in the distant past.

But I never will. I can make valiant attempts at it, but I never really will move on.

And so I keep the love in my mind… and with it comes all the hurt.

Why?