My story... on hope

I’m the girl who wants the epic love story – not easy, but real.  Too many romantic comedies have shaped my past – the good flirtatious fun, the dramatic break up, the change of heart and finally boy on the girls doorstep with stereo (or flowers) in hand proclaiming his love.  The happily ever after. 

The rational part of  my head tells me that that this isn’t real, isn’t how it should be.  The romantic in me can’t help but hope. 

With him we had the good flirtatious fun.  Friends knowing before he did how much he was into me.  Seen from such a distance.  The simple times.  And even now the disbelief of those who know us - the shock when they realise the news - we are not together.

The break-up has shifted us now, into a new place.  An unknown.  I miss him - my best friend - but I don't know how to be just friends.  We never really were just friends.  There was always that potential of something.  I don't want to be just friends.

So here I sit.  Learning the hard lessons.  Remembering the good.  Regretting the bad.  Stuck in this moment.  Ignoring the calls and texts that still come my way.  He can't let go.  I need to.  I have already told him I'm an all or nothing girl.  He wanted nothing.

But I'm still a dreamer.  Every night as I drift off to sleep in the bed that we shared, a part of me still has hope.  I can see him there, standing on my porch, white daisies (or coffee) in hand, whole in himself and happy on his own, ready to win me over with declarations of love.  I know that’s all an illusion.  The story never ends that way.  They never show what happens after the ‘happily ever after’ do they? 

In my sleepy mind I imagine him doing something he never did when we were together.  What right do I have to believe that it might happen someday.  It makes no sense to picture a possible future that has no base in reality or my gut.  Just a random vision that looks good to me now.  Something I never even knew I was missing when we were in the thick of it.  But of course I'm the girl who wants the man who buys her flowers.  Doesn't every one?

I know though that it doesn't work that way.  The world evolves, he moves on.  My life continues.  It only took us six months to arrive here, this new place, this shifted place - where he lives north of the river and I'm still in the south.  In six months we went from simple and easy and flirty fun to open conversations and cold hard fronts.  Revealing and recoiling all at once.  Contradictions and change.

The what ifs and wonder rattle through my head - how I should have seen the signs, how it could have been different, how it could have been better, how we could have been strong.  But I am complicated and he is stubborn.  I am unrelenting and he is hidden.  Hard work between the two of us.  The wrong time and place I can't believe - fate is a funny mistress and brought him unexpectedly into my life last October - early summer days - there was a reason in it all.  We were destined to fall into this place.  Meant to be where we are.  Here and now.  That's all we have left.  Memories and this moment.  And in this moment I want someone standing strong beside me.  Not a series of back and forths, on and offs.  Unknowns.  I want one love.   One true partner for better and worse, for forging a life together as partners in crime.  Through the good and the bad, the exciting and emotional.  Working together to achieve our wildest hopes and dreams, to weathering the storms of life - always hand in hand, the same side.  A team so formidable that even Batman wouldn’t stand a chance.

But reality is not the movies.  And you can't change the past.  You can only stay until after the credits.

A good friend once told me that - stay until after the credits - you never know what might happen, what you might see, what is to come.  And it's where I stand now, in the middle of the credits waiting for the endless list of names to roll, the musical selections to be shown, the tiny text that can barely be read at the speed that it scrolls.  Fully in the midst.  And I wait... I don't know what's coming next - no expectation or thought.  But a belief that there will be something epic.  I have hope.