I think, that in every relationship, at least in every serious relationship, one falls in love with the future of that relationship as well as the person. You start to imagine where that relationship is headed, what it looks like, and you love it, nearly as much as you love your significant other.
Because it's your (plural) future. The two of yours. Just you.
With Spider, I saw an incredibly passionate and intense relationship. One in which we would have plucked up the courage to travel the world together. The only way I can really think to describe it now (hindsight and all that) is to say that we would have thrown ourselves into the abyss, clutching hands.
With Mule, I saw something very different. I saw two people building a life together, growing through time and experience. We would have been best friends through it all. There would have been fights (we were waaaaaaaay too good at fighting) but I *knew* we could have fought our way through whatever happened. We are not two people ready to spend their lives together. But I saw us reaching that point.
And now as I sit here, my phone left at home to fight the temptation of texting him, I mourn the loss of what could have been.
"I'm so sorry this had to happen," he told me last week, while I numbly nodded my agreement.
I never saw us ending this way. Along with that future, that timeline that has ceased to exist, I thought the way we would end, if we did end, would be because of inherent differences in the way we wanted to live our lives.
But no. We ended because we couldn't handle the distance.*
It's not right. it's not fair. But here I am. Dealing with the loss of one of my very best friends. And trying not to think of what could have been.
I miss that future already.
*This is not to say that I think we shouldn't have broken up. I think it was the right call. But that is a story for another day.
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