Mirror Image

I sat across from her in the cafe of my hometown library.  She had been studying for hours, trying to prepare herself for final exams she would be taking three days after she broke up with her boyfriend of two years.  She told me that she knew she loved him.  That they would get back together in time.  That she was just waiting for him to show he could change so that they could get back together without going back to that same dead space of withered dreams of the honeymoon period's graveyard.

I sat across from a replica of myself, circa three months ago.  When this all started: the reinvention of Claire as an independent woman that could handle not knowing who she was and where she was going.  When I asked for a "break" with the Ex that turned into a "break-up" of life as I knew it.

I had never broken up with someone before.  I had never had an ex-boyfriend before.  He was my first and my one and my only for two years.  But suddenly I lived in a world where the one you're with may not be the one you're with tomorrow, and this technicolor reminder sitting across from me tore at the seams of my cross-stiched heart.

I started crying before she did.  I started crying for the pain she would feel.  Not today, not tomorrow, but for every day after she realizes that they would never get back together.  At least not in the way they had been before.  I cried for the days when she would look at her life and ask, "How did it all come to this?  I was so happy before.  What happened?"

I told her to stay strong.  That it gets better.  That it gets easier.  That things will work out, when neither of us knows any of this for sure.  I've learned that it does get better; that it does get easier.  But in exchange I've lost something I can never replace.  I've lost the feeling of a first love.  I will never look at another person the same way.  Suddenly the thought of falling in love is tinged with fear and guilt and a bemoaning sense of the loss I will feel when the love fades to dust.  As someone who has love for everyone I've ever met and the occasional passerby, this has been incredibly difficult to come to terms with.  It makes me want to run from anything that even hints at love wrapping itself around me--to rage and thrash until it loosens its grip enough for me to escape.

The only thing we know for sure is that one day we will die.  The rest, whether or not we actually live or love or find happiness, is up to us.