Endgame.

It was a wine-soaked weekend, and a tear-stained train home.  It’s over.

Somehow, somewhere, I made a massive miscalculation, the extent of which I have not yet fully ascertained. Deep-sea divers are looking for a recorder box I do not expect they will find.  I was so concerned about making good choices, and protecting my heart—but from what?  It turns out there was really never really a choice at all. Never really an opportunity for heart-bruising, at least not at the outset.  I was his friend.  His “and guest.” He wanted to catch up, because “it’s been so long.”

Except you don’t really catch up with anyone when you’re in the wedding party, do you? You’re off at lunches and breakfasts, at photo shoots and escorted entries.  A good friend or stable mate is a good companion.  A feeble foreign affair, resurfaced so newly from the depths, is not.

Friday night was really all we had. It started well.  But knowing now what I didn’t then, I’m well within my bounds to say that he should never, ever have kissed me.  He should not have found a room with just one bed acceptable, and he should never, ever have returned my impassioned “I missed you” with a “me too.”

Because to me, those words were real.  I missed him.  I ached for him and longed for him and if he would have looked closely, he would have known that all along.  This was my whole understanding of our relationship: that we had something huge, something real, but it just never got a chance to make it.  If that were true, he would have felt it, too.  I was banking on a common ground, on this idea of  “where to from here.”  We could have either said, wow, this is worth fighting for, let’s give this a chance no matter the distance and uncertainty; or, in the alternative, I’m sorry, I just don’t have it in me to keep this up, but thank you, and hey you’re great anyway.

Those were false options.  The presupposition there is that there was something at all.  I don’t think there ever was for him.  I was first and always just a friend, a girl who was nice and sweet and we kept in touch, sort of.  I never considered that possibility, and oh, do I feel foolish for it now.  All of the words I wrote, all of the things I thought I knew: Illusory.  I’ve been holding on to him, but he has not been holding on to me. This was unimaginably clear to me over the weekend. It unfolded slowly, but it was unmistakable: there, as the smoke clears, this horrific truth that must have been there all along.  He was the long phrase in the middle of the crossword puzzle that you think you’ve nailed square-on.  It fits and it works, and aren’t you clever for coming up with it so quickly!  You build on it, answering other clues to form to the letters.  Some of them are questionable, and you kind of wonder; but they do work, sort of, and you keep going. You look for mistakes and missed turns all around the edges.  You erase and scratch out the periphery without questioning the frame.

The moment of dawning truth when you realize that your anchor is a false one, that you’ve been building all this time on a total and complete error—that feeling, that impossible and sinking oh, NO-ness of it, is quintessentially exactly what is banging in my heart right now.  Times five billion.

He said he was sorry, that he never meant to mess with my heart as he hugged me at the train station.  I told him not to worry about it.  He said he’d write and explain, but I’m not sure whether there are any words. I, at least, am totally depleted.