Page 71 of Choose Us
I wanted her to walk out the door, but my legs buckled, and I could’ve dropped to my knees. I wanted to beg her to stay. My head and my heart were submerged in a giant body of water that acted as a metaphor for the emotional turmoil I couldn’t shake or process. There was no way to tread water anymore.
This was it.
The end.
She took two long strides towards the door. She stopped in place; her hand hovered over the door handle. She looked back at me. I averted my gaze.
Don’t let her breakyou, again.
“For what it’s worth, not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought about you. You consume my mind more than I thought humanly possible. I thought moving to Japan would help me move on, but all I’ve done is move my life and my body. My heart is still with youin London.”
She smiled. It felt genuine. That small gesture was all it took for the iron clad walls around my heart to fallonce again.
She continued.
“I don’t think I will ever be the same, knowing I found you, and I let you go. You may never understand, but I had to make a choice. I will resent my father for the rest of my life for being the one to instigate that choice, but here I am, and I can’t take it back.”She sighed.
I had to fight the urge toembrace her.
“Spending time with you again has been magical. It’s a time I will never forget. Apart from maybe this argument.” She smiled softly. Tears rolled down her face.
Brooke opened the door and stepped out over the threshold. She turned back one last time; her T-shirt was covered in tear stains. Her mouth quivered. Her eyes looked dulland absent.
“I loveyou, Holly.”
The latch on the door clicked into place, and she was gone.
“I love you too,”I whispered.
I watched through the blinds in the kitchen as she took a right towards the train station. The vision of her walking away would haunt my dreams for years. I slumped to the floor and let out an almighty cry.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I’ve heard people say, “timing is everything”, especially when it comes to relationships. I genuinely believed I’d met the right person in Brooke, and I’d just met her at the wrong time. It sucked for me, but that was reality, right? She seemed perfect, but the extenuating circumstances pulled us apart. That’s the way the cookie crumbled, or in my case, shattered.
My experience in Japan changed my view. Was bad timing just an excuse for the demise of a relationship? Surely, if she was the right person for me the timing wouldn’t matter? Surely, any obstacles or homophobic parents standing in the way of our happiness should be irrelevant, right?
The hardest part was knowing we could’ve been so much more. We never had the chance to explore the depths of our connection fully. We’d barely started. My experience left me in limbo, as I prepared toreturn home.
I believed time would slowly heal my wounds, a plaster here, a bandage there, but without invasive surgery would my hypothetical wound ever fully heal? What would be the surgery? Was it time to accept that not everything works out like the movies, regardless of how seemingly matchless someone might be for me?
Life was too short; the older I got the more that saying rang true. I had spent the last two years of my life pining over Brooke, desperately hoping by some miracle that she would find her way back to me. Now there was nothing left to cling to. There was nothing else to do. I hadto move on.
The hopeless romantic in me held on to a small belief that if we were meant to be we would find a way. It was what Beth told me the previous night as I sobbed in her arms. I was positive that’s what Paula would tell me too. My mum would recite some version of the same old story about meeting my dad when she was seventeen on a family holiday in Majorca. They’d lost touch for ten years only to meet again in the same area of Majorca. Did my dad stalk her? Potentially, and I teased him about it often.
The universe had a way of bringing two people who were meant to be in each other’s lives together. Holding on to that hope made the pain somewhat bearable, but it wouldn’t help me now. It was hard to forget I’d been replaced. That changedeverything.
After waving a sad goodbye to my best friend at the entrance to the departure terminal, I knew the next time I saw Beth in person, she’d have another little person to care for. I would be cool Aunt Holly, and there would be one more reminder I wasn’t getting any younger. The only constant in my life was the caramel macchiato I had every morning on myway to work.
The return flight always seemed longer. I think it was my body’s way of preparing itself for my return to work. The pilots must know, maybe they take a slight detour because they feel sorry for the mind-numbing normality everybody is about to return to when they step foot off the plane. I tried not to dwell, but reading my emails only made that harder. Work would be a good distraction, Itold myself.
Four hours into the flight and I was on my fourth gin and tonic. The more intoxicated I was, the sleepier I became, and the world around me felt more tolerable. A man behind me thought it was necessary to play a game on his laptop with the sound turned up to a socially unacceptable volume. The flight attendant kindly asked him to turn it down, but he was entitled and insisted he had a deadline to meet and didn’t want to wear headphones because they hurt his ears.
The man to the left of me was snoring louder than a herd of sleeping hippos, not that I’d heard hippos snore, but I would take a guess and say they’re probably loud. I’d become the considerate passenger who wore their headphones, mainly because I didn’t want to subject the whole of business class to the sing-along version ofAladdin; it was my idea of agreat film.
The constant supply of food helped curb my irritation. It was strange having a smoked salmon and asparagus starter followed by braised lamb shank all before eleven thirty in the morning, but the food was beautiful for plane food. It was a solid ten out of ten. The time difference was about to ruin my routine for at least the next two days, so as soon as my eyelids felt heavy, I forced myself to sleep.
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