Of Chemistry & Life
An open letter to those who say that in life, all you need is chemistry and timing.
Timing’s a bitch, but chemistry’s not that much better. If I could rewrite our ending — the violent death of an easy relationship — if you could listen without thinking that I was speaking in an attempt to “get back” at you… these would be the words:
Most days, I can convince myself that I’m nonchalant about you. Yet, you flit through my mind: a background thought that I can never quite silence. Always just a shadow away.
I sincerely don’t know why you have such a huge impact on me.
To the casual observer, even logically, just between us, we were lines that crossed, but for a moment. It’s incomprehensible and ridiculous that the tears I spilt over you came from a place of genuine hurt. But they did.
The night we spoke of why we couldn’t be, all that flashed through my mind were the tender moments shared between lovers. Poignant secrets and sorrowful regrets. Your large hands warming mine, the rise and fall of your chest, the smell of your pillow. The empty wine bottles on your coffee table… you standing in the winter wind without your coat, waiting for me to finish my cigarette. Drunken business plans with your roommate while you were in the shower, your dripping arms wrapping around me — and laughing. Lots of laughing.
Being with you was easy; like breathing, or blinking. We fell into place too quickly. A spark that fuelled a surprising camaraderie. A chemical reaction that burned.
There was no need for fillers.
Conversations that required decades of knowing flowed from the first moment we laid eyes on each other. You saw through me, the way I saw your hurt when I ended things even before I found out the truth. The stoic stiffness of your shoulders, the awkward hug goodbye and the multiplied blueness of your eyes reflecting my own hidden “almost, but not quite right” thoughts.
If I could start over, I would tell you that it was not when we first decided to cool off that hurt me. It was our final conversation the other night. Not because I loved you, but because I was mourning the death of our possibilities.
Not because I loved you, but because I was mourning the death of our possibilities.
I was mourning the death of who I thought you were, of what I thought we could be and of your utter lack of courage. Mourning, because I was hoping that instead of holding on to what was comfortable, you had done what was right. What was worthy of her love, of your promises, and a relationship of five years that trumped our “chemistry”.
I want to tell you that I’m sorry.
I’m sorry for her father’s condition.
For your position in this.
I’m sorry for my words, flung out in anger, specifically targeted to land exactly where I knew would hurt you most.
I am not sorry for walking away.
You and I were never “just friends”, despite what we might’ve wanted to believe. The conversations we had, were shared with a specific purpose in mind. What hurt the most out of all this, were the moments in between. Stretching ourselves to fill the gaps of missing with empty hello’s and how-are-you’s that only prolonged the inevitable.
In chemistry, every reaction has a byproduct: two atoms colliding to form a whole.
Our equation fell out of balance when she came back into the picture, but what screwed it up colossally was your need to hold on to me.
An imbalance that resulted in the loss of a relationship that given time, and the right circumstances, could’ve become a genuine friendship.
So yes, I don’t want to see you again.
I don’t want to talk to you, or hear from your friends, or hear of you from the overlaps in our circles.
I don’t want to have anything to do with you, not because I hate you, but because I want to hold on to what was good and pure about us: the memory of the man who held me when I broke down from frustration. The little boy I saw and comforted when he was feeling confused and lost by the directions life was pulling him in.
Right now, in these moments, the very thought of you brings bile up my throat and I don’t want that. Who you are now, is not who we were when you and her were done.
You made me feel like the byproduct of a bigger love story.
I cannot blame you for the circumstances that propelled you back into her arms but I can blame you for the way you handled it. You made me feel like the byproduct of a bigger love story. I wish you had the decency to tell me the truth. I wish you hadn’t held on to me even after you got back with her. I wish you hadn’t used our chemistry as a resort of keeping me in your life. The extra molecule that complicated a simple equation.
Most of all, I wish you had respected me enough to let me go, but because you couldn’t, because you “don’t want to”, I have to respect myself enough.
The truth is, chemistry doesn’t lie.
In high school, they taught us how to balance equations and get rid of unnecessary molecules, to form accepted wholes. This is me, rebalancing these equations for you, for her, and finally, for me, the way you should’ve done.
My acceptable truth: the way she, and I, deserve.
-U.
