Chapter 23 – The Cycle. - by Writewithoma

After the first time, it got easier to leave. That sounds wrong. It sounds like something a person says when they've stopped caring, and that wasn't it I hadn't stopped caring. If anything I cared too much, which was the whole problem. But the first goodbye had shown us both that we could survive a few days of silence, that the world didn't actually end, that we'd find our way back. And once you know a thing is survivable, it loses some of its power to stop you. So we broke up again. About six weeks later. Different argument, same architecture both tired, both too sharp, nobody reaching for the brake in time. Four days that time. He called. We came back. Then again, maybe two months after. This one lasted a week. I called first that time. Hated myself for it for approximately thirty seconds and then got over it because he picked up on the first ring and the relief in his voice made the pride feel stupid. The pattern had a rhythm to it. We'd be fine genuinely, fully fine, all the good things between us alive and present. Then something would build. The distance, the stress, the communication misfires, the things neither of us was saying. It would build until one of us hit a wall and the argument would arrive and we'd say things that had teeth and then we'd end it. And then we'd come back. Always. Every single time. Like two people who kept trying to walk away from something that had its hands in both our chests. What nobody tells you about that kind of cycle is how it lives in your body. How you start to carry it even in the good periods a low hum of awareness that this could tip, that the ground is not as solid as it looks, that you should enjoy this particular Friday because you don't know what next week will bring. It's exhausting in a way that doesn't show on the surface. You look fine. You're laughing, you're present, you're entirely yourself. But somewhere underneath you're always slightly braced. There was a night one of the good nights, one of the evenings when we were so entirely ourselves that the bad periods felt impossible when we were lying in his bed after, the room warm and dark, neither of us in a hurry to move or speak or let the night become the next thing. His hand was in my hair. I was half on his chest, watching the slow rise and fall of his breathing. "Do you think we're okay?" I asked. Not from fear just genuinely asking. From a place that felt safe enough to ask honestly. He was quiet for a moment. The thinking kind of quiet. "I think we're us," he said finally. "Which is okay and complicated at the same time." I considered that. "That's not a very reassuring answer." "It's an honest one." I turned my face up to look at him. He was looking at the ceiling, profile serious in the dark. "I don't want to keep doing the thing," I said. "The back and forth." "Neither do I." "So why do we?" He turned his head then, met my eyes. Something in his expression was very open in a way he didn't always let himself be like he'd decided the dark gave him permission. "Because whatever this is," he said slowly, "I don't know how to be without it. Without you." He paused. "And that scares me a bit." I stared at him. In all the months, in all the arguments and the make ups and the cycles, he had never said anything like that. Had never handed me something that direct and that undefended. I felt the weight of it land and stay. "It scares me too," I said quietly. He didn't say anything. Just looked at me for a moment, then pulled me closer, tucked me back against his chest, pressed his lips to the top of my head and left them there. We didn't solve anything that night. The cycle would come back we both knew it, even if we didn't say so. The things underneath were still there, still patient, still waiting to be addressed. But in that specific dark, in that particular warmth, we held each other like people who had found something rare and were not ready, not yet, to let it teach them what it cost. The game, I realized sometime around when I should have been sleeping, was still running. Neither of us had put down the controller.

Forbidden Love Story

Contributor Points

Points-to-Coupons

Referral Earning