Ending

So I stood apart from the crowd, reflecting on how the simplest and best things in this world were forever denied me. Love, friendship, laughter. It's not that I felt lost; how can you feel lost when there's nowhere to be, nobody to go with?

Don't feel sorry for me. Some people just feel this way. Peripheral. Once, though, I was alive.

His name is Richard, and he was my world for a year and a half. From the night I met him outside a Subways to that last, regret-filled phone call when we both stopped trying, he was my heartbeat, the sun in my sky. His home was my home; his friends, my friends. Every adventure in life we went through together, holding hands and running for the hell of it.

I’ve been over it time and time again in my head. Trying to pinpoint the exact moment our sandcastle fell apart. My best guess is that it happened at the most trivial of moments, as these things do - when we were choosing new curtains for the bedroom. We’d both had a rough couple of weeks; stress at work, in his case, and an ill nephew in mine. I suggested a few light colours, but he didn’t like them. So I suggested a few darker ones, but he didn’t like them. So I suggested a few brighter ones, and he didn’t like those either. I suggested he make his mind up what he fucking well DID want, or at least give me a fucking HINT... and he gave me the strangest look, like he didn’t know me, and he said “There are much more important things for us to decide.”

I cried myself to sleep that night.

That was months before the last thread broke, and there were plenty of good times after that day, but the memory of what he said came back to me after every fight, every angry word, every disappointed look. My paranoia wouldn’t let it rest. Sometimes I’d catch him looking at me pensively, as if trying to work something out, and I’d ask him what he was trying to decide. He never answered.

When a relationship ends, especially if it’s one you were completely invested in, at some point the inevitable question ‘what could I have done differently?’ comes up. What if I’d tried harder, been better, done the washing up more often? What if I’d spiced things up in the bedroom? What if I’d suggested blinds?

Sometimes these things just don’t work out. I moved out, ostensibly to ‘get some space’, but really because I couldn’t understand him and it was tearing me up inside. After two weeks we gave up. I moved away, started again with new friends, and a new flat that didn’t carry his fingerprints and his scent. But I haven’t been the same since. I watch couples in love with detached disinterest, knowing that I can’t ever feel that way again. I watch people laughing and joking in pubs, in parks, light-hearted and hopeful, and privately wonder how long it is until I move on again and get a new dead-end job somewhere else.

I can’t live with them, I can’t love like them, and I can’t feel the warmth of Richard’s skin on mine.

So I stand apart from the crowd. Don’t feel sorry for me, some people just feel this way.