Too Soon
10:58 p.m. | Jul. 08, 2007

The other day I was walking and I saw you. Huddled against the rain with your arm around a girl, and you were laughing. I saw you so clearly, with that secret smile on your lips, that I didn't realize I had stopped walking until a car horn blasted, and I had blinked the rain away, and found I stood standing still in the middle of a crosswalk at a four-way stop. When I looked up, of course, both you and the girl were gone, had never really been there at all.

I curse my overactive imagination all the time, but I hate it even more lately because it seems to be protecting me, and moving closer and closer to the inevitable life without you. Worse, it shows you happy. Happy, and embroiled in a life without me. Worst, happy with a me replacement. Which wouldn't be so bad if I didn't know that that's exactly how you see me.

I promise, soon (so soon), I won't be so selfish... it's just that I waited so long for you, and I know it's my own fault that things turned out the way they did and I'm not quite done punishing myself yet. Not yet, but soon.

I just couldn't have waited one second longer, could I? But then, I had thought for a long time that you had already left me. I thought you had stopped loving me long before I even met him, or had fallen into a different kind of love. A strong, never-leave-me kind of love. A sure thing. I was just trying to move on, trying on a life without you. I thought I'd had no choice. I couldn't make you love me as much as I loved you, could I? And why would I want to? Don't we all dream of it, that kind of love... don't we all dream of it... dream of it being free?

Why, oh why, couldn't you have just let me be? Why did it have to be that you had never really left me at all, that you had also just been waiting to come back to me, to reclaim what had been so completely yours, to tell me you still loved me, after I'd already moved on? Or, at least, had been trying to... I didn't know how much I hadn't until I saw your face again. And it lingers with me still. But I do love him. I'm in love with him! How I wish I weren't. How easy all of this would be.