Forever And A Day

Forever is probably the biggest word I've ever encountered. It's a concept that stretches far beyond my wildest imagination and I don't blame anyone who claims it to be a myth. It might very well be. But I surprise myself by realizing that I may actually believe in such a thing -- despite everything else inside and outside of my life.

I've had the unfortunate experience of having to hacksaw a person very close to my heart recently; someone that I've leaned on heavily for a decade. It was like getting rid of an important limb. It was severely painful and difficult to do. The indecision plagued me for months but I had to do it. We thrived on everything that was unhealthy -- battered self-esteems, irritating berations, regurgitated arguments, passionate yelling matches (short of throwing plates at each other), subconscious indifference and even juvenile name-calling. It was incredibly exhausting having to live through that over and over for ten years. Our relationship suffered an unnaturally long and agonizing death.

Despite all that, I still believed once upon a time that I was meant to be with him forever. A little naive, I know, but we clicked in more ways than one -- a rarity especially for me. Our fundamentals were solid. And funny enough, they were pretty much the only things we never argued about. Our philosophies, mindsets and beliefs flowed with each other like water from the pitcher's mouth. It was almost mind-blowing. For the longest time, they were the glue that kept us together in spite of the glaring differences in our lifestyles, personalities and interests. I thought it was enough. I had always been ready to take the good with the bad. After all, forever surely could surpass the little things, couldn't it?

Well, it didn't. The breakage in the little things eventually led us to our downward spiral.

To be fair, there were also the natural wear and tear of relationships that everyone goes through. And we were in a very difficult position to mend them as sturdily as most people do. We patched everything up with poorly chewed gum and willed them away. We were very good at ignoring kinks even though they constantly crept up to us. We figured that there were more important things we had to focus on because we had so little time to spend with each other. But these kinks -- they were powerful enough to gnaw two people apart. They clung to us like leeches and they unwittingly bred exponentially. And neither of us saw it coming. With everything that we've weathered together, I was confident that we were as strong as anything can be. But I was wrong. What didn't kill us only made us severely exhausted. And it reached a point where everything just became irreversible and unfixable.

With that at the back of my head, it just made forever sound that much longer. Surely it didn't have to be that way. But the thought of releasing one of the few anchors in my life and exposing a massive vulnerability for the cosmos to pounce on didn't bode well with me. However, there comes a point in our lives when we have to let go of good things in order to rid ourselves of the bad. Some call it sacrifice, I call it liberation. I had to set him free in order to set myself free. It was a trade-off I was willing to make because I love and respect myself that much. It's a simple case of self-preservation. I could no longer afford to lose more of myself to darkness.

My failed attempt at forever doesn't derail me from my faith in forever though. Just because I haven't reached it yet doesn't mean I'll never get there. And just because I may never get there doesn't mean it isn't there. And I need it to be there. I need it there because I need that one ray of hope that might assure me that I won't have to get hurt again. And that maybe, just maybe, it's all right to fully allow myself to be engulfed by someone else again. And to submit to that kind of surrender can never be achieved by the finite.

Unfortunately, there's no real way of knowing if forever does exist or not. After all, none of us can last that long. But to live believing that everything good will have to come to an end, I would live a very guarded and mediocre life. And life's a pretty damn long time to be lived like that.