A fictionalized adult relationship account.
We first knew each other years before the events that keep bringing us back together. By 2014, our lives had taken different directions. In 2018, as adults, we tried again. The familiarity was immediate; the relationship ended again in 2019.
Afterwards, he married and divorced. I built a different life too. Yet the connection remained easy to reopen, which I repeatedly mistook for evidence that it would eventually become stable.
In February 2021, I visited him in another state. We became intimate again. Afterwards, he said he wanted to be with me but did not think the relationship would work. I heard both halves of the sentence and spent far longer thinking about the first.
Later that year, I began seeing someone else. Still, I compared new relationships with the unfinished version of ours. That version had an advantage: it contained the strongest memories and none of the ordinary future we had never managed to live.
During another reunion, he asked whether I would have married him. The question hurt because I had spent years imagining that possibility. But asking about an alternative past was not the same as offering a shared future now.
I still cared about him. I did not know whether continued contact made room for a real relationship or kept me attached to a possibility he was not choosing.
Calling him my soulmate would make the story sound settled. It was not. The decision in front of me concerned the present: what he was offering, what I wanted, and whether another reunion would change either answer.
