Chapter 30 – Carry It. - by Writewithoma

He left on a Thursday. Not dramatically. Not with a scene or a speech or the kind of ending that gives you something clean to hold onto afterward. He left the way the hardest things always happened between us quietly, without enough ceremony for how much it weighed. He was going somewhere else. A new place, a new chapter of his life, the kind of move that puts enough physical distance between two people that the in-between we'd been living in couldn't survive the geography. He'd told me weeks before. I'd nodded like it was information I was receiving calmly, and then gone home and sat very still for a long time. The last time I saw him before he left, we didn't talk about the leaving. We ate. We sat together in the familiar way, his apartment around us, the city outside doing what it always did. We watched something I couldn't tell you what, I wasn't watching it. I was watching him. The way he moved in the space, easy and unhurried the way he always was. The way he laughed at something on the screen. The way he looked over at me every now and then, and the way his expression went soft in a way he'd stopped trying to hide a long time ago. I memorised it. Quietly, without him knowing. Filed every detail away in the place where I kept the things I wasn't ready to lose. Later, lying in the dark for what I knew was one of the last times, he said quietly: "You know this isn't" "Don't," I said. He was quiet. "Don't do the thing where you explain it," I said. "I know what it is. I've always known what it is." A long silence. "I didn't want it to go like this," he said. "I know." "I wanted us to" He stopped. The things we had wanted to be were too many and too specific and saying them out loud now served nothing except to make the room heavier. He knew that. So he stopped. I found his hand in the dark. Held it. We stayed like that until morning crept in at the edges of the curtains and the city started doing its daytime thing and the world remembered it had somewhere to be. When I left, he walked me to the door. We stood there for a moment in that particular threshold space, neither in nor out, and he looked at me with everything he wasn't saying sitting plainly on his face. He pulled me in and held me. Tight, and then tighter, the way you hold something you know you're about to put down. I let him. Then I stepped back. Looked at him one last time this person who had been my secret and my chaos and my Friday evenings and my 2am calls and my first and my most and my undoing and I found my face and my voice and I said: "Go. Be good." He smiled. Small and real and slightly broken at the edges. "You too," he said. And I left. I walked to my car and I got in and I sat there for a moment with my hands on the wheel, not driving, just sitting. The street was doing its ordinary morning thing around me. People moving, the day starting, the world entirely indifferent to the fact that something had just ended in that apartment behind me. I didn't cry. Not then. Not until later, alone, when there was no one to hold it together for. What I thought, sitting in that car on that Thursday morning, was the question I had been carrying since the beginning. The one that had started all of this, the one I'd turned over and examined from every angle without ever quite finding the answer. What happens when the one thing you want is the one thing you're not supposed to have? I knew now. You love it anyway. Fully, stupidly, with everything you have, in full knowledge that it isn't yours to keep. You build something real inside an impossible space and you tend it carefully and you let it be what it is for as long as it gets to be anything at all. And then you lose it. Not because the love wasn't real. The love was the realest thing. Not because you did everything wrong you did some things wrong, you both did, but that wasn't the whole story. Sometimes the whole story is just that some things are not built to last. That some people come into your life to change the shape of you rather than to stay. That the ending doesn't undo what happened in the middle. You lose it. And then you carry it. You carry it in the muscle memory of Friday evenings. In the particular way you laugh at horror films now, alone, because someone once shook his head at you for finding them funny. In the prayers you hear and think of him. In the games you still play, still sometimes cheat at, still sometimes call experience even alone because the word has his voice in it now and you're not ready to give that back. You carry it in the understanding hard-won, costly, worth every bit of what it cost that forbidden doesn't mean wrong. It just means complicated. And complicated things, loved well, leave marks that don't fade. He left on a Thursday. I carried him on every day after. And somewhere in the carrying, I found that what we had been even broken, even impossible, even ending the way it ended had been worth every single chapter. Every last one. — End — Thanks y’all for reading along 🤗

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