“Are you okay?”
The question comes out of thin air, yet lingers like a building storm.
Why would the phone conversation with a trusted friend start in such a way? What did they know that I didn’t? I asked what they meant.
“So you haven’t heard.”
No. Apparently, I hadn’t.
“I thought you knew. Your ex-wife. She’s engaged.”
My friend waits for a response that doesn’t come, leaving nothing but the strange silence of dead air.
“Are you okay,” the conversational loop repeats. “How do you feel?”
My mind scans itself, searching for traces of thought. Bits of emotion that has gone undetected and buried under the memories of life and time. The scan runs empty.
“I feel nothing,” I tell my friend. “There’s nothing to feel.”
How it Started, How it Went
That sound.
I heard her before I saw her. That bubbling strawberry milk of a laugh, cutting through nervous tension. I could smell and taste the laugh as much as I could hear it.
I fell in love with her before I ever saw her.
As the years went by and whatever had once sustained us now bled through cracks in our glass hearts, the milk bubbles of laughter and choice memories all that remained inside. I held onto those for as long as I could, but, one by one, the bubbles popped, leaving nothing but a broken idea of love.
There’s no use in crying over spilled milk. But what happens if there’s no milk left to spill?
It’s been many years since that failure of a relationship. The pieces of broken hearts mended. Stitched and glued and soldered and tacked together. Scars remain, but the hearts can now retain love once again.
And even so, I can still recall the laugh. I struggle to make out her face in my mind. She’s nothing more than a blurry memory with few choice details. But the laugh remains.
It makes sense. I fell in love with her laugh. And so her laugh remains, echoing in a closed-off closet, tucked in a rarely visited hallway of my mind.
You Moved On, Sometimes You Just Don’t Know It
Rarely do we go through life without relationship carnage. We’re pocked. We’re cut. We’re injured and damaged and shattered and broken. You enter future relationships with the craters caused by previous ones.
Sometimes those scars still bleed. Other times they are clawed open through no fault of your own. Or maybe a friend sends you an Instagram post or a Facebook update you’re not prepared to deal with.
You do your best to move on from the pain, but remnants of the pain remain.
I have a dog. She has three legs. I adopted her the day after her leg was removed. Undersized and unable to walk, we spent the first several months together building strength and learning how to walk again. Now, she gets around better than any dog I’ve ever had. She pivots faster with one hind leg. She can remain seated and yet turn on her butt 360 degrees while watching the room. And yet, five years later, when she dreams the muscles over the space where her leg should be will flex and pulse. She’s running in her dreams. Time has proven unable to fully erase memories of a distant past.
The same is true with past loves. Time will continue, but that doesn’t mean you’ll fully forget. No more pain. Just fleeting memories of what once was.
And through it all, you’ll eventually discover you moved on. You may not be able to pinpoint the exact moment the previous love no longer had any hold on you, or when seeing them no longer stirred an emotional cocktail of pain and angst and love and sorrow, but when you realize you’ve broken free, you can finally give your current and future relationship your all.
You can finally give yourself your all.
When Your Past is Nothing But A Stranger
My friend prodded. They didn’t fully believe my lack of feeling.
They changed the subject after I confirmed the emotional flat-line.
The news of someone I could no longer picture. My senses couldn’t help fill in the gaps. Her scent and her touch and her taste long since faded to dust, returning to earth like the decomposing flowers placed on the grave of our dead relationship.
She has become nothing more than a stranger to me. A stranger with a familiar name and a bubbly laugh. If even that still exists.
The engagement of strangers, because after a decade apart, that’s all we were now, and perhaps that’s all we were destined to be. Perfect strangers with nothing in common but pieces of faded memories.
And now, despite whatever we once shared, I feel nothing.
But I hope she and her future husband are happy.
Because I’d never wish a failed marriage on strangers.