Ending

There is a happiness there. The question is whether it is a sad and elusive compromised happiness. Or if the amorphous cultural baggage of what Love is supposed to look like have merely convinced me of that, and what is really on offer is happiness, pure and simple, and therefore best of all.
This is as good a time as any to note my privilege: Here I am, deciding if I’ll give her another chance. Somewhere, right about now, she’s retiring to the solitude of her room, and it is beginning to settle around her, the bare cold fact of it, our Ending. And how little else she has, or thinks she has. To fill the space, make the smile come, make the future seem optimistic. Me, I can sit around and write quasi-philosophical tracts about love and risk and whether it could…whether it should...whether she…whether I. But she is alone right now and it’s settling down around her. The terror of her loneliness, the fact that she sees no other roads, at least none appealing.
Poor baby.
And my worry, that all my recalcitrant thoughts about going back to her (or, really, letting her come back to me) center on that one phrase: ‘poor baby’. I want to save her. And in that is the risk of self-sacrifice to do it. Risk, because if you give your life for someone, well, your gone. Somewhere better or perhaps better nowhere at all. But if you give yourself for someone’s happiness through giving them your heart, your future, well you risk a coldness, a bitterness, a slow creeping doom that will make you hard and worse make you hate. My job, then, is to figure out if that’s truly what I’m risking, in thinking even thinking about letting her come back to me…