Too Late… or is it?
Sometimes it’s just too late. It’s too late to get your ass to the shops because it’s past closing time, it’s too late to hang out the washing as the sun is rapidly dimming into the evening and it’s too late to plant some vegie seeds because the season has turned and you have to wait for another cycle. And sometimes it’s too late to say ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I love you’… still. Two and a half years too late. Just as nature has its cycles, so do our relationships; people come and go and sometimes they even stay — it’s a reason, season and a lifetime. The strongest bonds are always the hardest to lose because the connection remains even after the relationship has failed for whatever reason… or a number of them.
We do what we do, when we do it, how and why and often we think we’re doing something for the best. Like breaking up a three-and-a-half-year relationship because you’re not sure if you have it in you to go on when together, you bring out the best and worst in each other. You carry on because you find someone refreshing in the face of the toxicity of your recent relationship with your now-ex fiancée but in the end, they don’t complete you in the same way. There’s a connection, sure, there’s one otherwise why would you start at all but it’s just not that complete package. You try again with someone new and again fall into lust-love only to find that she too is not fulfilling your needs and wants — what are they anyway? You don’t even know exactly what they are but she is just not your ex fiancée. All the while, you and your ex fiancée gravitate towards each other, delicately and slowly finding a new balance between you as friends, a new way to love one another and she is the one you turn to every time something good or bad happens. You’re there for each other in such a close way through steps in your lives. There’s a pattern here and you don’t realise it until it’s too late.
You’re more than friends but not quite a relationship. Perhaps, that’s always how it’s going to be but you realise, like a stab in the heart, that you have never really let her go; you’re still engaged in your heart. What is worse is that you realise it when she’s thousands of miles away across the world and dating someone else. Call it selfish — and you’re aware that it is — but you’re scared that the thought in the back of your mind for two-and-a-half years of a second chance may never be realised. It just might never come around. Even when she is back and standing before you, the ‘other girl’ back in Italy and no longer in the picture, she is still saying that she’s not sure if there’s that type of love left but there’s deep love, yes, there’s certainly deep love and care for one another. But you want more. You want the second chance, to play the new cards right instead of the old, outdone and harmful ones that you both played before. You have done some growing and so has she, alas hers has outgrown you. You ask yourself why did you break it those years ago? Why couldn’t you stick it out and stay by her side and together work it all out? No, you were impulsive and tired, troubled and wired towards defeat, towards a fail. What you saw was that you were better off without each other, that she and you both deserved something good like how you brought out the best in each other but without also drawing out the worst.
At the end of the day, you’re exes — your relationship will always hold a special connection and even as you struggle with the idea that she is returning to her home country so far from you, returning to be with family and friends and another girl with whom she has connected, you know that she just might have the second chance to be happy. Even it that is not with you. When you love someone, you want the best for them and sometimes the end of you two is the beginning of a new adventure. Sometimes it’s just too late for that relationship; it is outdone and outgrown but it’s not too late to live and love again.
