The regrets of the “one that got away”

“The one that got away” is an ex who has an exalted place among your past loves.

They are the one you focus about.

They are the one who floats to the surface of your thoughts when you are trying to sleep, the one you can still picture a future with — in a parallel universe.

You just aren’t sure whether it’s the universe you’re supposed to exist in or whether you belong right here in
reality.

The one that got away isn’t someone with whom you had a terrible, devastating breakup.

They didn’t cheat on you (or vice
versa).

Things simply didn’t work out because you were young and immature, or one of you had to move, or you just had other things you needed to do before you
found this kind of love.

The point is that things never ran their natural course.

You never really found out that you two could never work out. It just ended, for
circumstances other than falling out of
love.

This ex was a good person, your breakup
didn’t change your opinion about this.

They are someone who deserves love in
their lives, someone another person would be lucky to be with.

They had things they needed to work on, but then again, so did you.

You’re both good people, but maybe
you just weren’t good enough for each
other at the time.

The way to spot “the one that got away” is to think of the ex that makes you hopeful about what your future love life can be like, rather than making you upset or pessimistic about human nature.

You know your ex —this ex — will always be the one that got away because things will always be unresolved.

You still respect them too much to let your breakup tarnish your opinion of
them.

You know the person you end up with is going to have to do better — the one
that got away always raises the bar on what love can really be like.

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•One man’s story…..

I catch your scent sometimes.

In crowded places where the air gets thick and people rush past but their clouds hang frozen in the air.

And there you were, in the most
vivid of memories, from that one whiff, I
could feel the soft of your skin, see the
creases of your eyes, hear the heartiness of your laugh.

I used to lie awake while you slept.

I used to delicately touch your face and endless wonder what cosmic alignments brought you into my broken life.

I used to be devoured by my fears of not being enough for someone so charismatic, so vibrant, so endlessly charming that much of my days were spent swimming in dark waters of
anxious insecurities.

I tried to hide the tenderness.

The eternal flame of powerful emotions that ripped through me whenever I thought of you, but they burned ever brighter by the day.

I felt sick when I exposed too much, when my mouth kept talking about how lovely and perfect you were when all I wanted to do was have the self-control to say nothing.

Be cool, be aloof, the one who cares the least holds the power.

But I lost all reason when I met you.

I descended into a place where I couldn’t think, I could only feel, and I wanted to feel you every second.

You saddened and frustrated me.

You spoke of love like it was a tangible thing you could study and know.

I wanted you to get lost in your own heart, to jump into the unknown and unleash your truest, most hidden self
to only me.

But you remained guarded.

I confused your lust and passion for my body as a connection to my mind and soul.

I fell so fast and so deep that other parts of my life ceased to matter.

I was convinced you had more depth than you wanted me to know about, that if I got close enough to the farthest centre of your soul, I could break you open and you would become equally overcome with love for me.

You fell away.

Or maybe I pushed you with my impatience, with my intensity, with my
endless need to be equally enthralled with each other.

I woke up at the bottom of the rabbit hole, more broken than before.

Being with you stopped filling me with excitement and anticipation and instead was replaced with only disappointments, in you and in myself.

Maybe I had misjudged you, that
what you presented to me was always all
there would ever be.

Or maybe it was, simply that, I wasn’t the one for you and you weren’t the one for me and we ran together for as long as we could until life faded us out.

And though I know that I will never be able to explain how quick and furiously I became smitten with you or why you never made the trip to that place for me,

I will always wonder if you remember my perfume.

If the scent of it on another reminds you just as vividly of those moments together, when everything was brilliant and full of possibility.

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•One girl’s story….

It’s been a long time.

You knew him right before you moved on
from something important.

You didn’t want to end that stage in your life, but you were graduating or you got a new job and it had to be over.

You had to go.

Your friends were moving on too maybe, but you didn’t think they felt the loss as acutely as you did.

You’re the kind of person who chops your
life into distinct stages in your mind.

It’s lonely being like that.

You’ve always felt like a fragmented person with a million free- floating pieces.

Just a few of them matched anyone else’s.

Until you met him.

He seemed nothing like you at first.

But something about the look on his face –those little expressions he made that he
thought no one else noticed – said he was your person. He asked you to take it easy.

You talked casually.

Neither of you are casual talkers.

One of you would speak and the other would pause to think before saying
the next thing.

Those pauses were loaded and both of you were nervous and it felt like forever had passed between one word and
the next.

But it always turned out to have been just the right thing to say.

You tumbled into bed like you’d fall into a good book or something: so natural that you didn’t even notice the progression.

You talk about the people you see.

You make him laugh.

His thoughts are as catty as yours and it makes you feel great.

Every night he lies on his back in your room and you swing one leg over him, tracing his face with the tip of your finger as he tilts his head to your hand so you can memorize him more.

He has distinctive marks on his body, like a light scar under his eyebrow.

He likes when you play with it.

No one else ever noticed that about me, he says.

He’s patient in bed.

You tell him how to touch you and you can see his brow furrow as he tries to get it just right.

He’s amazing, because he tries so hard.

He confides in you.

He always acts like it isn’t a big deal but
you know it is.

Your days and nights are on two separate planes.

He doesn’t overlap with the rest of your life. But your soul; your gut; your very essence – the two of you are linked.

And it feels like that’s the only thing in the world that matters.

You’re still wondering what happened.

The most important parts of you were closer than anything.

But the most relevant parts weren’t.

He was the right person at the wrong time.

Or maybe, you think, before you push that thought away, the wrong person at the right time.

He came along when you were just about to break and you’d still be feeling that damage now if he hadn’t been around to protect you.

It can’t be fate that makes connections like that happen.

It feels like more of a mathematical
formula.

And in the end it just didn’t add up.

On your last night together you plead with him not to forget you. “You’re not a
forgettable person,” he says, and he kisses you long and hard because he really means it.

He says goodbye the way he knows you
want to remember it before he closes your door.

You sit down, touch your lips, and let
yourself re-feel everything that happened from beginning to end.

We like to think our lives are linear.

That everything you do accumulates into a better decision-making process that will get you the person you’ve really wanted all along.

But what if it isn’t?

What if he’ll always be the person you’ll have had the most piercing feelings for?

What if those few months outweigh the rest of your relationships for the rest of your life?

Maybe what you want the most and what’s best for you really aren’t the same thing. (And if that goes for you, of course, it goes for him as well. You feel smug. You don’t want to be smug though, because you really do want the best for him. Really.)

You tell yourself you lost nothing really.

You two had what you had and it will always be happening on a loop in some corner of the universe.

Or maybe just a corner of your mind.

Maybe you like the feeling of doomed
love.

You relish that bittersweet piece of your past that casts a golden shadow over
the rest of your forward-thinking life.

Or maybe you just see him on Facebook
and wonder what would happen if you ever got to see him again.

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These two stories tell of people who deserved to be in our lives forever,but the pettiness of our value system chose to let them go out of our lives!

Just some random thoughts that came to my mind….©Profarms’ Random Thoughts®