You are in love: you spend a significant part of every day together. You know his favorite songs and the way he likes to do his laundry and he knows that you have a little bit of an inferiority complex, but he loves you anyway. You try a new restaurant every Saturday morning because he loves breakfast, even though you only tolerate what you consider to be the worst meal of the day. You’ve watched every episode of 30 Rock while sitting on his couch, your cheek sometimes resting on his.
You are a couple and everyone knows it. You walk places hand-in-hand and subconsciously gloat over the fact that you have found the person that you believe to be your one; you consider yourself lucky, blessed, unique, gifted. Your face blossoms pink with the touch of love and you put on a little bit of weight because he doesn’t really care what you look like (he only sees your heart) and you stop wearing the clothes that he thinks are ugly and it’s ok because he looks at you more than you look at yourself.
But that’s not all you have to give up to make him happy. You give up your time and your personal bubble, letting him hug you, kiss you, hold you when he wants to because you know that he has an inferiority complex too. You give up your sense of adventure in surrender to his bizarre need for complacency.
You give up your dreams for the future and that’s when everything changes. You wake up one day feeling like you ate an apple core, like you drank from the faucet of a house in a developing country, like you made the worst kind of mistake anyone could ever make. And advice from friends, from family, from professors pours into your ears nearly unwanted, but you know you need to hear it and, as unpleasant as it is, it confirms the feeling in your gut that tells you that you are about to give up your whole life to the wrong person.
And you tell him. You tell him how terribly sorry you are and how much you regret hurting him, but that you don’t see a future with him at all anymore. You tell him he’s a great guy, the best guy, but that you’re not the best for him. In your head, you’re thinking that someday he will thank you for making the decision that he wasn’t experienced enough to know needed to be made. And you barely look him in the eyes, afraid to see the accusation and blatant feeling of betrayal you are sure will be there.
You have nothing else to say, but he is still sitting on the couch, waiting for something more.
“Can we still be friends?” you say, in complete disregard of that one time you promised each other it would never come to this.
He leaves. You see him in class and around campus and at graduation, but you are never friends, not really.
