It doesn't hurt!

We broke up. We stopped talking. We vanished from each others lives. And it did not hurt. At all. Things carried on like normal. And after a couple of months, while dreaming about her, something hit me. And I woke up in a flash to this thought, “It did not hurt.” At that moment, it felt like my mind went into an overdrive, all the air got pushed out of my lungs and a stinging question screamed to be answered. What kind of relationship doesn’t hurt when it ends?

Maybe an abusive one and you realize you don’t deserve that shit. But ours wasn’t abusive. Instead, we cared a lot about each other, at least about the real things. Then what was it?

It wasn’t one-sided. We loved each other. Deeply. And I recalled all the times we showed our love to each other, sometimes with passion and sometimes with tenderness. A tenderness so soft you would think we were made of glass. But these memories were like fuel to fire. My inquisition became wildly more raging and stormy. It drove out all other thought from my mind and forced me to come up with an answer.

Maybe, it was the distance. Twelve time zones is a lot. My body’s clock gone haywire was proof of that. And that is what people said. "Long Distance rarely works”, “You were unlucky”, “The distance killed the relationship”. Now it seems like I had found the answer. It seemed logical and there was the entire world backing up my theory.

So it was the distance that eroded my feelings and turned it to dust. The texting that went from all day every day to just twice a day: “Good Morning” and “Good Night”. The days of radio silence and the complete absence of romance and humor, except after a fight. Maybe these were all signs that something was wrong, but my ego never really let me see it for what it was.

Satisfied with what I reasoned, the storm inside me went quiet and the blank peace returned inside me. And with that comforting thought, I went to sleep filled with hazy dreams.

It is incredible how we can lie to ourselves. The truth I amazingly hid from myself was that I knew. I knew from the moment I met her, she was the one for me but I wasn’t the one for her and one day it would end. She was a real person with real beauty and flaws and I was a husk, a shell that molds itself to be whoever she needed me to be. There was passion and romance as we slowly unraveled the other to go past the walls we built around our hearts. But once she reached within me, all she could see was not who I really am but a mirror.

Of course, our relationship was going to end. I knew. And everything after that was me going through the motions. So when it ended, it was something that had already ended long ago. And thus it didn’t hurt.

This was my dream, a dream I so badly wanted to remember when I woke up the next day. But it felt like catching the sunset in my hands. So beautiful you want to catch the rays in your hands but with an incredible finality, they go away only to welcome the inky darkness that follows. But a single thought remained, a thought so provoking it set my insides on fire,“It did not hurt”. I groaned and opened the last text I sent her. It was “Goodbye” and it was yesterday.