The End Of Love.

We sat on the balcony of his apartment, looking at the trees and the forest that made it easy to forget we were in the middle of the most polluted city in the world. A good realtor knows to distract you with an unexpected view when trying to sell you paradise in a gas-chamber. Over the past decade, we had spent so many evenings on that balcony, it was my spot in their house. That happens over time, doesn’t it? Sometimes you spend so much time in the home of people you love, you carve out a little space for yourself and they let you do that. They let you feel the type of familial comfort that allows you to claim space, to unearth a little piece of their territory and call it your own. That day, I was there to relinquish my claim, none of us even knew it then, but I was there to say goodbye.

“Can I hold your hand?” I asked him.

He took my hand in his and placed it over the table that stood between us. He always bought tables that were the same height as the armrest of the seats beside them, I really loved that and when I told him I did, he beamed in joy while revealing he did too and I was the first person to have ever noticed. I know the very specific and elusive thrill of that feeling, of being seen for yourself, I enjoyed making him feel it. As he held my hand, we looked straight ahead, we didn’t talk at all but we sat there for a long time. He squeezed my hand; I stroked his skin. If he was surprised by my request, he didn’t show it, but maybe that makes sense. Him and his partner were the only two people in my life I’d actually learnt to enjoy hugging.

Usually, I don’t hug anyone and if I do, or am forced to, my discomfort is palpable but when I have long-term relationships with people, like my sisters or my closest friends, I make myself amenable to a little bit of affectionate touching. No one would ever casually ruffle my hair or unthinkingly snuggle up against me while watching television, but there are a few people in my life who can expect certain specific forms of physical affection in designated instances. I hug my stepson on his birthday, mine and each time he leaves for and returns from visiting his mother. It isn’t physically comfortable for me but it does mean something, it means I am willing to endure occasional discomfort to give the people I love some things they may need and when they value or appreciate that, it feels like an intimate admission of love. I know you shouldn’t have to do difficult things in order to show people you care, but we are who we are, and I am definitely the person who will try to express love through my own discomfort. With them though, I reached a place where the routine hugs each time we met and departed weren’t uncomfortable anymore. I actually enjoyed the platonic affection of their hugs, even in my body, not just for what they meant.

I don’t know how that happened but I also know exactly how that happened. When I met them, I was an overworked, twenty-one-year-old in an abusive relationship processing years of abuse from my parents and other men while always being fine, hyper-productive and independent as fuck. They were decade(s) older, stable, madly in love, compassionate and intelligent people with an alternative lifestyle that made sense to me as a sexual choice but also represented how love can make the strangest of situations work. Besides, she was a lot like my mom, if my mother had been a function of her brilliance and not her pathologies. He was a lot like my dad, if my father had been more emotionally in-touch with himself instead of vast expanses of ocean. Retrospectively, it reads like a stereotype and even I want to stand before myself and scream the word therapy at myself over-and-over again so I don't go down the path of psychosexual reparenting via proxy parents who vaguely resemble the real-thing but life isn't so neat and tidy while you're living it as it is in retrospect.

Besides, everything is not a choice between healing and destruction, especially in relationships, and those relationships were both and sometimes neither. It was healing to have a family where I was genuinely valued for who I am, and that is how it became, these roles were not so accidental or unacknowledged but the depth of them cannot be adequately expressed in cold, benign words, but I also became entangled in repeating the same destructive, sometimes sexual, eventually abusive, patterns that defined my relationships with my parents. Really, I speak only of myself here, and of course, there are long and complicated answers to the question of what happened but this isn't the place for them. This isn't the place to discuss how my ethics wouldn't and didn't allow me to love them anymore, it's not a place for my morality, it's a place for my grief and I felt an immense amount of that when my family—the kind you choose—ceased to exist. Funnily enough, it was precipitated by them doing a thing I always wished my parents would have done: Splitting up. I begged my parents to get a divorce when I was ten because I knew they would be happier, but they stayed together and blamed me for their misery instead. I didn't want my friends to ever split up but they did and they blamed me for their relationship ending anyway.

That's the risk you bear when you repeat patterns to fix them, you realise you could rewrite the whole story, with better characters, doing everything right, and still end up at the same outcome. It was as hurtful with them as it was with my parents, and the end of their love brought me the same amount of grief and guilt as the continuance of my parents' façade because it meant the end of my family too. As with my real family, with them too, I had to be the one to leave their world. They parted, but they still got to keep the ruins, remnants of their life together, they still got to have the offshoots of that unit, but I had to emancipate myself. You can't get out on a matter of principle and still keep the façade. You have to be the one to lose everything, and to be willing to do that, instead of balancing a husk of a relationship with lies, strategic blindness and platitudes, but you can still miss what you've lost. You can still remember the love. You can still grieve. Outside of the blame, responsibility and accountability of severing relationships, there is loss, and I cannot subsume that under my anger or hurt. I loved my friends, they were my family, and perhaps, I will always miss them.

That is, what I think, i was trying to tell him when I held his hand and sat alone with him in vulnerability.

He was mad at me then. I was mad at him. He was mad at her. She was mad at him. We were all mad at each other. We knew. You have to end relationships before anger turns into familiar resentment and compels you to stay long enough to start enjoying the putrid outcome of microdosing on manipulation and revenge in the name of love you have to keep because, after all, you've known each other for so long and done so much for each other. You have to end them when you've seen they cannot be repaired by trying every possible solution or they morph into an entity whose success is measured only by how much effort you are making, without realising the effort you're making is to the end of lighting a fire without cover in a rainstorm. You have to end relationships that brought you an immense amount of joy when you start to become scared of spending time with the people you love and enjoying their memories instead. It's like actively mourning someone who is alive every single time you see them. Sometimes you just know when it's time, you don't plan it, and as I sat on that balcony that afternoon, I knew I would never be there again. As I held his hand, I knew it was the last time we would touch.

I may have cried.

I had to cry then because I knew that later I would have to unpack so much information that would prove to me my decision to end those relationships was correct for me that it would be hard not to see it as a good decision and wallow in grief instead. That's the problem when you end relationships that are or turn destructive or unhealthy, you're mad at yourself for grieving them, for missing them, and maybe they don't intend it, but the people around you, the ones who saw you suffering in and because of those relationships can make you feel like there's nothing to mourn. It's like killing a monster. A time to celebrate. Clarity and truth, at last. Rejoice!

But love, good god, it makes you feel like you are a part of something, in the same way that a movement to change the world or a family does, it makes you feel connected to humanity as a force that is greater than the sum of its parts, like you are living an elemental truth that cannot be articulated but will not be denied. When you love someone, or at least, when I do, thet get a part of my heart forever, when I'm with them, I can be reunited with that part of my heart when I am with them, but when the relationship is gone, they get to take that part of my heart and leave, it grows cold and maybe, it even dies, but either way, I lose it forever. It doesn't matter whether the people I loved were good or bad for me, heck, it doesn't even seem to matter whether they were good people or not, it still feels like a part of experienced a little death each time you lose love like that.

In some relationships, like these ones whose time had come, it takes a long time to wade through anger, mistrust, resentment and doubt to get to grief. It feels wrong to even get there. That moment on the balcony was over two-years ago, but it is still only now that I am able to let myself acknowledge that I miss him without explaining why I shouldn't. It is only now that I feel pain at her absence that isn't substantiated by anger and reminders why I should not feel pain. It is only now that I am able to see the loss of my family as separate from the reinforcement of my values but perhaps most importantly, it is only now I allow myself to experience this grief for what it is. Love that is gone. Even the wrong love hurts the same to lose as good love. Even the loss of a shoelace you wore around your wrist hurts the same as the loss of a diamond if enough of your heart was in it.