Goodbye.

I’d said the word a million times over the course of my lifetime. Left those behind that betrayed me, rejected me, those that I loved, those that I hated….but somehow, this time felt different. This was an ending that I couldn’t justify, no matter how many times I teased out the wreckage of the present in my own mind.

Our time together was short, but when you know, you know, don’t you?

There’s a certain feeling that comes from wanting someone. The more you want them, the more insane you go. Logic is no longer a valid argument against desire, and the thought of leaving without looking back is no longer as easy as you once assumed it could be.

It hadn’t been immediate for us. It had been slow, careful, and most days resistant. We weren’t the kind of people who wore our hearts on our sleeves, we were the kind who joked and laughed every troublesome emotion away with the hopes that it might give up and disappear before we would have to face it.

He was rough around the edges, the kind of man who was endearing, but not necessarily charming, at least not immediately and not with everyone. I liked his name, the way it rolled off of the tongues of everyone around him. I heard it before I knew who it belonged to, and immediately decided I liked its owner. And, then there was his face.

He was handsome. Fit and strong, with dark features and an unforgettable face. But my favourite thing was the side profile of his nose. It was imperfectly perfect, and it was entirely him in a feature. How many times I took him in from that perspective and fell irrevocably deeper in with him was simply too many to count.

I was beautiful. I knew because he was shy around me. The kind of nervousness that came from high stakes. And then, he wasn’t, and I knew right then in the rare glimpses of his personality, that I wanted him. There was no doubt about it.

We played the same game him and I. Pushing and pulling, welcoming and rejecting each other in equal measure. He made me mad, he made me high, he made me crazy.There was something to him that was so irresistibly frustrating.

But I was no better. That’s what happens when you meet yourself in another, you are subject to all your own bullshit. All the tactics and tricks come back to bite you in the ass and there’s no one to blame but yourself, because you are really the one setting the pace.

If I was frustrated with anyone, it was myself, for everything I did to him he mirrored back to me. And that hurt, no matter how much I deserved the treatment he gave me.

I couldn’t quite remember when I decided to dive in head first, probably the first moment I knew I was leaving. I knew there was nothing left to lose, and for how much he’d played me, I wanted revenge. Because what was it worth to want a man as violently as that anyway? Nothing really. 

And now, here I stood, in the storm of my very own actions, leaving a man I did not want to leave. My chest ached with the thought that he could walk away, but the fact remained, he had a choice, didn’t he? If he left now, he was telling me that our time was done, that in his mind there was nothing worth valuing here. Not for him. I wanted to scream. I wanted to shout and sob and hit him. 

Don’t you see how much you will regret this?

But then, I remembered that men often do not have the capacity to regret much of anything these days. He would be off and gone onto the next by the time regret ever came around, and that was when I realised just how much I had wasted my time. For if the next could come along and replace me in a split second, steal everything I’d worked so hard to evoke out of him, what good was he to me anyway?

Maybe he’d never look back on it and wonder where I was or what I was doing. Maybe he would let out a sigh of relief that at last life had taken care of a craving he didn’t even want by moving it out of his sight. But it hurt just the same now.

Where did this strength come from? To ignore me now, to let me go when he’d shown nothing but an insatiable desire to speak to me, to be around me, to consume me. I wanted him to suffer for the ways he’d wronged me, but I knew that deep down, he hadn’t wronged anyone as much as himself when he deprived himself of me.

The fact remained, I had survived him, even if only barely.

His never ending presence in my mind was nothing but an unwelcome and frustrating side effect of something I still couldn’t name. Was it love? I hoped not, for if this was love, it certainly lacked contentment. There were no fireworks, no butterflies, instead my stomach churned with wonder, my heart ached with yearning. All for a man who would never admit that even if only for a second, he saw something in me he liked. 

What exactly did he have to lose?

I looked into his eyes, seeing his longing residing there. I had yet to encounter a man who wanted yet did not act, it was something of a myth I’d heard. Men were hunters, gathers, programmed strictly to go after the things they wanted. But what happened when you encountered a man who seemingly lacked that, was it genuine or was I delusional? J was a mystery, a man who had never quite been clear about anything since the moment I first encountered him. He was a paradox, a man in a shell which did not match his personality. He was a geek, someone who was smart with the passion to take him anywhere in the world he wanted to go. The only thing was, he was perfectly content to graft with his boots on the ground, chasing demons who did not want to be caught. 

He was a man with a loving family, he mentioned them in passing with the kind of tone that led me to believe they were close. He was the kind of man who’d been loved as a child, who’d probably been doted on by everyone around him, leading him to believe that everyone on the outside had nothing much to offer him. He was the silent, thoughtful kind. I’d witnessed him make changes to things I’d said to him - the leather in his house, his handwriting, the coffee creamer in his fridge. He cared about the things I said, no matter how difficult it was to believe sometimes. 

He blinked slowly as I stared into his soul, my chest constricting. Time had slowed, almost as if to give me the space to grieve him in real time.

Sometimes I wanted him so badly I gave him no choice but to disappoint me. I wanted to be chased, adored, cherished, but I feared that he had occupied no other role himself and didn’t fancy giving up his perks for me. I was not a hunter or a gatherer. I was a woman who had fallen victim to a man that had very little to offer me. 

“I’m-” I took a shaky breath, knowing that what happened next would define us forever. “-leaving.” 

His face took on a frown, the betrayal in his eyes hard to mask. But he did. One second it was there, the next it was gone. I could see the discomfort bubbling below his skin, scratching and clawing at him, begging him to make me stay. I was seconds from dropping to his feet and begging him myself. 

We both seemed to resist the urge, the air charged between us.

“When?” He asked stoically. 

It was not the question I had been expecting. I wanted something sweet to fall from his mouth, but as I let myself glance at it, I realised that it had been crafted with the purpose to hurt its listeners.

“Today.” 

His face remained set, but I could see his chest still. 

I waited for his reply, hoping that it might be something worth waiting on. 

“Good luck, Katie.” He said, his voice low and void. 

Don’t do this to us. Don’t you see that all you have to do is ask me to stay and I will?

Good luck, Katie.

Six months of back and forth, and good luck? 

I had teased this man. I had encouraged him, reassured him. I had laughed with him, watched him, longed for him. I had slept with him. I had dreamt of him. And, good luck? 

He was exactly the man I had pegged him for. Straight from the beginning. He’d want but he’d never take. And, for that, as irrational as it was, I hated him. 

“Thanks.” The word felt foreign on my tongue, like it was spoken by someone else. 

We remained like that for another moment or two, before I finally decided that I would not continue to choose him. For if he was this person now, he’d been this way even when things had been good.

“So-” I swallowed down my pride. “I guess this is goodbye.” 

He cleared his throat, nodding, the eyes of a deprived soldier returning home. Fuck him and his eyes, for all the good they had done either of us. 

“Goodbye, Katie.”  

And then, he was turning around, leaving me, just like he always had.

I left not long after, but this time I wasn’t following his lead, this time I was walking in the opposite direction.