How does someone who can’t let go exist with someone who can’t be held?  Or someone who is afraid of heights exist with someone who only knows how to fly?  Neither is wrong, nor is one better than the other, but there is an inherent danger in these opposites.  See while the fish may learn to breathe eventually, it runs the risk of dying and drying out first, just as the bird runs the risk of drowning if it stays too long.  Is there some sort of middle ground where these two can meet?  I haven’t found that place quite yet.  I like to think it exists, I always had hope it existed.  It still may, but I know my fears have pulled us under just as much as his independence has caused us to suffocate.  Neither one of us is at fault with that part—that is simply the nature of who we are respectively.  I’m seeing now that the very nature of who we are is capable of destruction and illusion if we aren’t very honest about who we are.  It happens without intending to hurt the other, but it happens nonetheless. 

Sitting in a Taco Bell, so reminiscent of what we did 20 years ago, he finds the words, “marry me” on a sauce packet just as he is trying to come to terms with ending this relationship.  Having admitted he was only with me out of guilt, I now must reconcile the fact that I need to return to the water and allow him to fly.  Now I feel the guilt of having forced him to walk for so long.  The only way to solve this is to let him go.  Completely.  Even a few short days ago I would have taken finding a packet like that as a sign, indicating that there was still hope—and now I’m not so sure in any of the signs I thought I’ve seen over the years.  Holding on to hope hasn’t gotten me very far.  It certainly hasn’t gotten me to the goal.  I’ve pissed off a hell of a lot of people in my day by sticking rigidly to some idea of how things should be—always trying to force people to swim my way, thinking I was following the right path.  It doesn’t work. 

I have to settle into a reality where fish are fish and birds are birds.  Every now and then they can meet but they can’t live where the other does.  I can’t hold onto someone who doesn’t want to be held.  He’s not mine to hold, he’s his own person and, even knowing that logically, the feeling of letting go breaks my heart and makes my stomach drop.  I know this will never be the same, and I can tell myself all day that it’s for the best, that it makes sense.  I can ask myself why I really want to be with someone who doesn’t want to be with me.  I can ask if I know who I am well enough to say that this is the version of me that I will always be and there is some chance he will change his mind.  The reality to THAT story is he has so many more opportunities than I do and he will be just fine wherever he goes.  I squandered mine for him (my choice) and it just didn’t work out.  I tried so hard for so long to fly and forgot how to swim.  And I’m scared and I’m sad—I’m sad for what was, the very real things that happened when we started this journey, sad for what happened along the way, sad for what could have been, sad for what will never be.  And all I can do is let go, and dive.