Oceans Apart

When I called you, three months after we had last spoken, I couldn't blame you for being outraged.

"You left me for a guy who treats you like that?" You were unsympathetic, and rightfully so. When I think back on the various ways I have told the story of our breakup, I don't really know the truth. My story has changed multiple times. The convenience of deceit is simpler than understanding the mechanism by which love failed.

My moving to a different country was a big change in our relationship. I hadn't understood the effect that such a move would make. We had lived on different coasts during the two years we dated and so I couldn't see why having an ocean between us would make much difference.

Perhaps, it wasn't just that we couldn't communicate as easily, it was also that suddenly I needed you more. I was lonely, isolated and wanted, like Max, "to be where someone loved me the best of all." So, I relied on you more. It was an additional burden on our distance strained relationship. You disappeared, leaving a cryptic message on my machine, "I won't be able to talk for a month." A job opportunity, the first in years had appeared and you had taken it. I was happy for you, but my grief for myself overruled.

That was the end. I was lonely. I needed a family, and so I fell in with first guy who seemed to need me like I needed you. After the month had passed, when we finally spoke it was so that I could tell you I had found someone else.

I don't know where you were when we had that conversation. It was second of January and I was wandering the deserted city while most people were warm inside their houses. When we spoke, I was blocked from the steely wind by a luminous shopping center that resembled the hull of a sea freighter impossibly balanced between skyscrapers and convenience stores. It was late, and everything was closed, but the storefronts were illuminated and shop assistants, like tiny people from a parallel universe, rearranged clothes and posed mannequins through the windows. I had just spent my first Christmas away from my family. The stores were busy with new year sales. They, too, were getting rid of the old to make space for the new. I climbed up and down a concrete staircase in a plaza holding onto the metal railing in one gloved hand, and the phone in the other. Patches of dirty snow were encrusted along the sides of the building and an eddy of freshly fallen dry snow swirled in front of the closed doors.

Despite my remembering the place, I forget what we said to each other. I told some lies. You were mostly silent. I gave the final push and you closed to me.

I never saw you again. I tried to see you a few years later, but you explained that your new girlfriend would not permit such a meeting. It didn't sound like a very convincing story. Now, I don't know that I would want to see you. It would satisfy a curiosity, but there is really no reason for us to ever meet.