The consequences arrived years later
Yesterday marked three years since we ended, since I shattered whatever hope you had for us ever working out.
I blamed you for everything, for my family never being attentive enough, for my high school failures, for my past relationship failures. At that time I probably couldn’t even see you clearly, you became an empty figure onto whom I could project all my failures, misfortunes, and insecurities.
You stayed despite all of that, never once making me feel like I was less, like I needed to be perfect just to stand in front of you.
My friends back then… “You shouldn’t hang out with those people,” you kept repeating, wanting better for me even when I showed you only the most heartless and cruel versions of myself. I still listened to them. I dragged your name through the mud, allowing people I dared to call friends to spit on it and step over it.
Today I am alone in the apartment, like the past weeks, months, years.
They aren’t here, their lives have taken an even more miserable turn, half of them deep in debt and misery, the other few still entrenched in their toxicity, with nothing in their life but people they’ve screwed over the years and problems pilling up.
You saw me going down this path years ago, didn’t you? I never listened.
With the way that I left, with the way I allowed things to go, you probably think you meant nothing.
Only now I know I never found another girl who would spend hours listening about my boring job. Never again has someone asked me about my dreams and fears for the future. No other girl tried cheering me up multiple times on my worst days. No other girl sat down with me to talk about my favorite childhood movies. You were really something. And I threw it away.
I wish for a universe where I made the right choice. Where I took you on your dream trips, where we sat in the restaurants you liked for hours, talking about your studies and the way your cat is the most clingy creature on this planet.
But I didn’t.
I am not going to reach out to you. I am not going to message you. I only know now that nobody even close to you will appear, and that whatever mud I threw on your name was my own bitterness. You deserved someone who chose you from the start. Not a boy coming back years later to admit he chose wrongly, that his choices caught up with him.
I hope that there’s a universe where I chose you. In this one, I hope someone else gives you everything you deserve.