Happy Birthday: The bittersweet.

Today is the Ex-Fiance's 30th birthday. I never know how to feel about his birthday when it rolls around, but I always feel the same way. We haven't spoken since I moved to Prague and I don't ask and our mutual friends don't tell. This is probably for the best.

I started writing a novel after we started dating the second time around. Some of it was true, some of it was not, some of it was true in the sense that it happened, but not in the sense that it didn't happen to me. But the ending of it was the ending that had always been, in some way or another, with all of my boyfriends. Or rather what the ending would have been if I'd loved them a little more. Or if they'd loved me a little more. It hurts me now to see the ending I wrote for my characters because there's a lot of it that ended up being somewhat accurate. I'll spare you the understated dialogue, but here's the paragraph at at the end...

From the manuscript:

If it had been a movie, there would have been a lingering kiss, the kind reserved for lovers in the purest sense of the word, but this was not a movie where the audience feels some deep sympathetic sorrow for the characters who, under different circumstances, could have spent all eternity together. Brennen and I were never those characters. So there would be no heartbroken sigh from the woman in the third row while we exchanged last looks or worse, last kisses over an agonizingly long period of time, no backwards glances over the shoulder or turning and running through the terminal to catch each other. We said our goodbyes as best we could and that was it. That really was the last time I saw Brennen. We kept in touch for a year or so and then everything changed again. I moved to Prague and he got married and that was that.

That all makes more sense if you can read it in context, I promise, but some things aren't meant for other people to read. Even if they're just fiction. But the basic premise remains. The Ex-Fiance (whose name is not Brennen) and I had a similar final split. The details aren't exactly the same, obviously, but what you read above is.

I didn't know, then, that in the end we would split up, that we would want lives so completely different that they couldn't be reconciled. There was a period of time that I really did think we'd spend forever together. I didn't know, then, that I would move to Prague, it was just somewhere that I'd always wanted to go. Weirdly, we did keep in touch for a while and I did move to Prague and then we stopped communicating. We stopped having more than passing things in common and that's okay.

I sincerely hope he's happy, wherever he is. 

I hope that he got everything he wanted.