One Dove

It was never meant to last. Of course it was never meant to last. It was a fucked, messed up something that was doomed to end in equally fucked, messed up way. I have always known that. You always know such things. They are seated in your brain, somewhere behind the veil of crazed up hormones, love and desire and thousand of other emotions that stop you from acting logically; they are there, waiting to be pulled out when it all happens.

I knew he was going to leave, but that did not make it any easier when it really happened. There was nothing easy on it.

After he left, my mind went on an emotional roller coaster, moving headlong from the heights of giddiness over what had happened, to the anger and guilt over what I had done to him, and then back to the giddy happiness. It was a crazy cycle that made me all too tired and I fell asleep on the spot where he had been lying not too long before.

When I went to work the next day, and didn't find him on his usual spot, it instantly worried me. I have always, always worried far too much about him. I guess he didn't worry about anything anymore, and so I did it for him instead. I felt a lot of things for him, judging by how intense everything that involved him was.

I looked for him, feeling a bit ridiculous and stupidly desperate. I was telling myself that he was just somewhere else, somewhere... somewhere enjoying the money he had taken from me, enjoying the drugs he got for them, or maybe getting more money from some stranger, exchanging his body for it. My thoughts were getting messy, and the more I thought about it, the less sense it made. And the more worried I grew.

A few desperate days and lonely, even more desperate nights, people around me started to notice. I know Ellie must have noticed before, she noticed stuff like this as if she has some strange sixth sense; either way, she didn't show or hint anything until those few days later. I was usually glad for her help, but not this time. I didn't want her to talk to me, I didn't want her – or anyone – to tell me it was going to be alright. I didn't want their words that felt so empty and pointless. I wanted him and that was all. I just wanted him.

But Ellie somehow knew this as well, and I'm starting to think it was more than just her psychology degree showing up. Because when she caught me alone, fighting one of the computers that kept shutting down after a few minutes, regardless of what you did or didn't do with it, she didn't say those empty words. She didn't tell me it was going to be alright. She didn't tell me he was going to come back. She didn't tell me he would find me.

She hugged me instead, the top of her messy hair tickling my chin, and offered to search for him with me. She drove me around for days afterwards, along the same streets, same spots, day after day with never-ending patience. She never once said, or even hinted, that it was all useless. She never once said anything about the result that was never any closer. She never got angry with me, not even when I yelled at her as if it was her fault, because I couldn't dealt with my own guilt. Not a single time, and that's why I love her so much. She helped me through the days when I thought I was going to lose it. She kept me alive and quite sane, which was more than I could have ask for.

As the time passed, the desperate need to find him inside me dulled into a strange, dead emptiness. I stopped caring. Not just for him, I stopped caring for anything. I barely left the apartment, staying home from work. I didn't tell anyone about it, right then I didn't care if I was kicked out without a single word. I kept sitting at home, drinking and not doing anything at all. Not knowing what to do. It was ridiculous, because I only spent a few days with him, and yet when he was gone, I felt like my life lost the purpose.

With him, I had a goal. However stupid and unreachable the goal was, it was something. I put everything into it; I spent every waking minute thinking about saving him. And then suddenly, with a thud of the door being closed, he was gone, and with him the goal as well. Completely and irreversibly gone.

This time it wasn't Ellie who saved me. This time it was Livie. She came to my apartment like a hurricane, ignoring anything I had to say, ignoring my curses I had never properly apologised for yet and my drunken babble, and spent the whole Sunday cleaning my apartment. I felt asleep on the couch, lulled by the vodka and the soft clinking noises she made when she did the dishes. When I woke up, it was dark, I was tucked under a freshly washed, warm cover and the apartment smelled like Christmas cookies.

I sat up slowly, feeling so tired as if I haven't slept at all. Livie must have heard me, because she walked over from the kitchen, smiling softly at me.

“Feeling better?” she asked as she put a plate with the cookies on the coffee table. Strangely enough, the smell didn't make me sick. In fact, I didn't feel hungover at all; I just felt tired.

I nodded slightly to her question, pulling the cover a little higher. She noticed it and gently pushed me to lie on the couch, smoothing the covers. It was as if I was seven again.

There was long silence. It was hard to keep my eyes open; I was falling asleep slowly when Livie spoke up again: “Ellie told me everything.”

I was instantly awake, and I wanted to speak up, to be angry at Ellie for telling people how I messed it all up, but Livie continued talking before I could open my mouth. She sounded as if she was scolding a disobedient kid. “Oh yes, she had every right to tell me. It hasn't been easy for her either. You spilled all of your anger and fear on her, and she listened to you because she is your friend. But it's been a lot for her.”

She paused. I mouthed a soundless sorry, apologising for both messing it up and being harsh on Ellie. Livie's features softened. “I know you are. I know.” She reached for me, pulling me up to her arms, and my eyes suddenly itched stupidly.

I haven't cried for him. Not a single time. But when Livie held me in the way I haven't been held for years, I was all too close to it. Because it was then that I fully realised that he was gone, completely and utterly gone, and that he would never come back to me. That I would never see him again.

I still don't know what happened to him. And in an ironically twisted way it was a perfect ending to our relationship. My insecurity and fear, his pain, the lack of knowledge and words to express anything, a whole damn lot of guesses, and a few rare moments of bliss, it was all we ever had. All too little for a relationship and at the same time, it was all too much to deal with. It was bound to end.

Yet now, when I look back at it, something in me still aching for him, I don't regret what we had. I don't regret any of my choices, whether they have been right or wrong, except the single one. The one when I let him leave.

I pulled back and gave Livie a crooked smile that she returned warmly. “I made you something,” she said softly, reaching for the plate. She handed me one cookie, shaped like a bird. I frowned, but before the question reached my mouth, she continued: “A dove. To bring you peace.”

I still have the cookie. It's stone-hard now and certainly not edible, but that one dove, that is all I have from the relationship that changed everything.

And sometimes, even now as years have passed, I still catch myself looking for his blue eyes.