I can't usually relate to love songs because the people who write them are the creative types, and the way they feel things isn't the way I do. That being said, I can't stop listening to Taylor Swift's Back to December since last night. You see, now I know exactly what she's talking about, and I can finally understand what people mean when they say they listen to her songs because they feel like they're not alone. Thanks to her, I don't feel alone either.
You see, I broke someone's heart too, but it wasn't last December, it was three years ago. And yesterday, I saw him online (on Skype, which I never deleted him from for some reason) and decided to try talking to him. If you know the Taylor Swift song, this should read like the lyrics. We made small talk about how our lives are going, how busy we are with work, and how people we know are doing. I could feel he was just giving me the cursory answers he would have given anyone else. I knew this because I know that his father passed away two months ago. They were very close, no I knew from the moment he said "I'm doing ok" that he had his guard up.
After two hours of random conversation, I went for it. I apologized. I told him I missed his friendship, that I was sorry for everything that happened, and so so sorry for the fact that he lost his dad. I was shaking the entire time. This is a guy I haven't really spoken to in years, since we broke each other's hearts in craptastic fashion. His guard finally dropped and he told me he was still hurt. It kills me now, because what hurts me isn't what he did to me then, or what I did to him. What kills me is that I lost him, that's the worst feeling. I play back the good times, and the bad times, and I miss him still. It was about a third of what I've wanted to say to him all these years, but I don't think he wanted to hear the other two-thirds. I was surprised he actually heard this one.
I realized after the word vomit was over that I was ok with whatever he said. All I wanted was to tell him how I felt. If he just went offline without a word, I would be hurt, but I said what had been urgently trying to get out for years. I was at peace. In retrospect, a large part of me expected he would say something like "too little, too late" or that he would just say he had to go, or in some way avoid the fact that I probably sounded retarded. "This isn't a movie" I thought "There's no necessary, unavoidable happy ending".
The next time he wrote anything (and it felt like forever) I could only read the first word. It was the nickname he used for me when we used to date. I didn't read the rest of the sentence. I couldn't. My eyes welled up and tears quietly streamed down my face. I could see the little pencil animation start writing, then erase, then start again only to stop. He didn't know what to say. This happened four times. While I didn't give much thought to what I was saying and just unloaded it all in the best phrasing I could think of on the spot, he was actually mulling over what to say. To me.
After all these years, after all the hurt, I'm still Lu.
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