My mom had a 5 AM meeting this morning and while she had the decency to use her headphones, she hasn’t quite perfected her inside voice. Throw in nonstop notifications now that Robin was finally awake and could respond to my messages, and I was awake at an unfair hour.
So it was Instagram, emails, and bank account- still broke, no surprise.
Then all of a sudden, ding.
The yellow icon flashed.
“You have a new message.”
It was so early in the morning that I was still scrolling with one eye open. The other eye still blurry and dry and possibly covered in crusties.
But I checked the message really fast and that last line woke me right up.
“Be in a relationship.”
Excuse me, what?
It was a heart flutter and a gut punch all at once. I wanted to squeal and kick the bedsheets off and do a little dance. But I also wanted to grieve. After the initial excitement, there was a sadness that I just couldn’t shake.
Thankfully Wednesdays are therapy days.
I told Meighan everything.
I told her about the book and the bravery and the salt flats. She was wide eyed and could not believe the words coming out of my mouth. “A new frontier” she called it.
Then after the buildup, I got to the sadness.
I told her how it feels like I’m pulling from two opposite ends. The one end where I know everything and have grown very fond of it, and the other end where I know absolutely nothing and I’m terrified. I’m panicked. So I’m pulling both sides close, but for one to really thrive- I’ve got to let something go.
And I know I need to. Everyone has told me I need to. I know I should. But it just makes me so sad thinking that I’ll have to let him go.
But before I could even let this sadness register, Meighan said she knew exactly why things were sitting uneasy with me. She knew exactly why I felt thrown off and confused from that text message.
Hearing someone else say it was a shock to me because after all those years, Mikey could never.
Here was someone new already saying the words I was hoping to hear, but after everything we had been through, Mikey could not and would not. Doing laundry together. Making dinner after work. Watching tv shows on the couch. Playing board games. Reading books. Not reading books. After all of the life that we had built together, I was still never enough for him to want to be in a relationship.
He would have never uttered those words.
Regardless of the fact that by definition, everything about us was a relationship. If it looks like a horse and sounds like a horse and even smells like a horse, then it’s probably a horse. If two people are together all the time, talking every second of the day, and even sharing a house key, then they’re probably more than just pen pals.
But now the thought is coming from someone else, and it’s up to me to let go.