Now you're just somebody that I used to know

Funny how things seem to end sometimes. There never is any middle ground, is there? It’s either in an explosion of repressed words and emotions, crying, screaming and begging, or in complete and utter silence.

A creaking sound as it cracks, a crash as it shatters to pieces and then nothing.

Like you’re in the middle of a frozen lake, in the beginning of spring. The adrenaline is pumping in your veins, you recognize the danger but it’s all just too exciting to stop. Your heart is pounding in your chest, your legs are shaking, your breath is coming out in sharp gasps, but still, there’s a crazy satisfaction in testing the limits. You know that if you go too far if you walk too far in, you’re in danger of the ice breaking and giving away right under your feet. But you ignore the rational voice in your head, telling you that that’s far enough and you just keep going, testing your own courage and the ice underfoot. By the time you hear the cracking sound, you’re in over your head, drowning, frozen to the bone and rendered completely immobile.

It serves you right for your arrogance, for thinking you’re above all that emotional love shit. Because you’re not above anything. In fact, you’re in way over your head with things you can’t possibly control. Take that for tragic irony or poetic justice or whatever. Lesson learned.

I don’t know why I expected anything else from you. Why I thought that you were better. Why I expected you to prove me wrong. In fact, I should thank you for actually proving me right every step of the way. It was an insane tug of war between mind and proverbial heart.

“He won’t care” stated the mind, a fact cooly delivered with a touch of sarcasm.
“Of course he will. He’ll be back in no time. Just wait and see!” wailed the heart.

Well, my heart is a lot like a five-year-old. It doesn’t accept logic, it can’t be coerced or convinced of “right” and “wrong”. It can’t be bribed into following my mind’s rules and regulations; blindly or otherwise. When its favorite toy is taken away for no reason, it falls down in a hysterical fit, beating hands and feet on the ground screaming and wailing. Until it falls asleep, exhausted right there on the ground.

The damnedest thing happened, though, you see. Something I never expected to ever take place, but what one should expect after being soaked in ice-cold water. I woke up. My heart’s tantrums stopped. And that magic emotional grip you had on me got washed away in the undercurrent.

They say that what comes into your life, leaves in exactly the same way. That the one who felt the most in the beginning, still feels the most in the end. What all those romantic accounts of love lost forget to tell you, though, is that the pain stops. It fades and it abandons you. Eventually.

And that’s that.

Things Ι thought meant the world –or the end of the world as Ι knew it– no longer mean a thing. The earth’s axel was not affected by your exit, nothing in the universe shifted, the sun still rises in the east and sets in the west, no destruction and no chaos left in your wake. Each day becomes better than the last and bit by bit wounds have healed. And life goes on.

Life has an uncanny way of giving you back your dignity when you think it’s been lost forever. Then again, maybe it’s just survival instinct at its most glorious. Sooner or later, though, you just became somebody that I used to know.

Not someone I’d lived a lifetime’s worth of moments with, a lifetime ago. Or so you keep telling me.

Who is it you said you are again?

No, no, you’re mistaken. This is not bitterness or cruelty. I have no reason to be either of those things with a stranger. You remind me of someone, there are fleeting images in my mind but, then again, I could be mistaken. Falling through thin ice into freezing lakes can do that to a person’s memory, I guess.

Come to think of it, there once was this one guy. He looked a hell of a lot like you. Sounded like you too.
I used to know him better than I knew myself.
Is that you?

Sorry, but I don’t recognize you. I’ve changed a lot, you see.
Now I know me. You’re just somebody that I used to know.

And guess what – life goes on.