Chapter 21 – Drift. - by Writewithoma

There's a specific kind of loneliness that exists inside a relationship. It's worse than ordinary loneliness. Ordinary loneliness has a clean shape to it you're alone, you know you're alone, you can work with that. But the other kind sits beside someone you love and still feels like distance. Like you're on the same page but reading different words. That was this season. We were still together. Still called, still saw each other when the schedules allowed, still fell into the ease of us the moment we were in the same space. But there was something in between the moments that had changed texture. A kind of drift that neither of us was swimming against hard enough. He travelled again. Longer this time. I'd stopped asking exactly where or for how long because the answers had started to feel like shapes around the real thing rather than the real thing itself. He was going. That was what I knew. And I was staying. And the distance between those two facts was doing something quiet and ongoing to us that we weren't looking at. School hit its worst point around then. I was drowning in deadlines, running on bad sleep and worse food, existing in that particular tunnel vision of someone trying to finish something enormous. I didn't have the bandwidth to manage my own stress and also manage the shapeless anxiety of what was happening with us. So I did what I always do when things are too much I put the most complicated thing on a shelf and dealt with everything else first. He went on that shelf. Not deliberately. Not because I wanted to. Just because I had nothing left over and he wasn't here and the shelf was the only place that made sense. When we talked during that period, I was more surface than usual. Fine, busy, tired the words you use when you don't have the energy for the real ones. He accepted them without pushing, which meant either he understood or he was doing the same thing from his end. I suspected both. There was one call where we stayed on the line for almost an hour and said almost nothing of substance. Just existing in the sound of each other. His breathing, my background noise, the occasional comment about nothing. At the end of it he said goodnight and I said goodnight and I lay in the dark after and felt, very clearly, the shape of something I didn't want to name. The feeling that we were two people holding onto something from opposite ends. Both holding. Both trying. But the distance between the hands was getting wider. I didn't say it. He didn't say it. We just kept holding, because that's what you do when you love someone and you don't know what else to do you hold on and you hope the distance stops growing on its own. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't. And you don't always know which one it is until you're already in the answer.

Forbidden Love Story

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