We Are Not The Same Anymore
What would it be like if two people who were in a relationship suddenly saw each other again years after their breakup? Let’s imagine…
We suddenly saw each other again. It may seem poetic, but we turned the corner and bumped into each other head-on, with no escape.
“I moved on and destroyed each specific memory because I do not want to find you in any of my corners, except in my dreams, which is why you are where I no longer seek you and I now seek happiness.”
Julio Cortazar
Stop being
To stop being is to accept, in part, a breakup with yourself. A part of you, that no longer represents who you are, still wishing to return this illusion. So letting it go is, sometimes, a very necessary fracture.
Apparently, in many cases, what we continue to be in love with is that past moment in time. That reflection is no longer our reality but, to avoid facing that dissonance, we try to live from a memory, a shadow.
Sure, relationships change and can be a roller coaster with all kinds of twists and turns. And of course the infatuation vanishes and love can hold together two people who agree and accept that the changes are just that, changes.
This doesn’t harm the relationship but it makes it become increasingly larger, more mature, stronger, and almost immortal.
When it’s over
But this is not a story of struggle, it is a story of escape and of battle. This is the story of a landslide of problems that go beyond the emotional or passing phase.
It was difficult to accept that, as much as we tried, the relationship did not make us happy. On the contrary, our unhappiness increased with each failed attempt.
That initial state of being in love passed and the love could no longer grow, at least not in a natural and sincere way. So we decided to continue loving each other in the distance, in another way.
We mourned our loss, but we still loved each other. So cowardly, yet brave at the same time.
Of course there were shades of bitterness, questions that will never have answers and discomfort in our pride. Wounds that eventually end up healing by looking at one another on a corner where we meet again by running into each other,without notice, in our mirrors.
We are no longer the same. We are who we were, but we do not recognize ourselves in that way.
I just hope she smiled and also felt less weight in her backpack that day we said goodbye again. Reaffirming that we are no longer that reflection and that it just simply doesn’t hurt us anymore.
And also, I wish with all my heart, that time has put us each of us in place: happy, just as when we met.
“I gathered the defects I had left behind to be with you. I summoned revenge, spite, pride.
I returned to my hands daggers, to my mouth cruelty, and to my heart selfishness.
By taking from you the weapons with which you killed me I fled from purity and sincerity.
I stifled my own blood the innocent one who did not know that giving you everything made him a man with nothing.
Empty for you. I missed you, only the time still I remembered the taste of your lips. Or the way the sea breaks against your bare skin.
But today I am safe from your eyes. The bodies of the others have forgotten yours. And everything I hope for does not require you. I reunited with selfishness, spite, pride. How could he be wrong for achieving, in exchange for what he loved most, the reward of his freedom. “-Benjamin Prado-
