Unfinished.

“Love in its purest form may not always be mutual, but it must always be unconditional.”

CHAPTER 1 – “Cause sometimes you only want to hear the beginning of a story…”

I guess you could’ve said I saw it coming. It was about late February when all the insecurities and all the arguments we’ve had in the past years came full circle. In recent months I had disappointed her time and time again whether it be her birthday or even just a weekend together. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel like trying harder, it’s just that after so many years together I felt the banal reality of our relationship and being the child that I was, I didn’t think it would matter much if I did. We’d been together for what at our age, felt like an eternity and the drawn out idea of being together “forever” didn’t seem like a real possibility.

“You’re the only one who could make me feel so many things at once, anger, hate, frustration, love!” she yelled as I laid there emotionless on the couch.

“I don’t know what to do, what do you want me to do?!” I replied.

“I just want…I just want you to care…”

I was so naïve then, not giving her a second thought about how she felt and how much this really meant to her. In my mind, she cared almost as much as I did for this relationship which by then wasn’t much. I hadn’t realized at the time that it meant just the opposite. She was emphasizing our flaws in order to try and fix them because she wanted so much for us to work. Blindly I passed this off as yet another argument to get through the day, similar to how most of our days went by lately. We’d yell, scream and argue and eventually make up, which really just meant postponing it for another day. This time though, it was different.

“You don’t even care about us anymore…you don’t care about me…” She said.

“Yes…I do.” I replied indifferently.

That was probably half a lie. I didn’t even look her in the eye. I still cared about her, I just wasn’t sure I cared about us. To me she was just being her overly dramatic self and I figured when she was done being emotional then that would be it. Plus I had grown pretty accustomed to her always being around no matter what, that even if we fought, I never gave it a thought to how it would be if she wasn’t. I thought I’d had her down to a tee. So being the less than brilliant man that I am, you could count on me to spit out just the worst possible comment at the worst possible time.

“Maybe I’m just not good enough, you deserve better you know?”

Her eyes began to water.

Those words would come back to haunt me more than you could ever imagine. I didn’t mean it; I just said it for no good reason.

She was quiet now, the yelling had ceased and she looked up at me. Her deep brown eyes, the ones I would lose myself in and the very ones that used to sparkle every time it saw me were now staring straight into mine, crying out as if I had just broken her heart. She held back her tears this time, and her crestfallen face was all I needed to see to know what I had just done.

As she headed for the door, her last words to me still to this day, echo within my thoughts.

“If you love me you’d keep trying no matter how hard it seemed…”

It hit me and it hit hard.

For the first time in my life, forever didn’t seem long enough.