saturday night meltdown

I knew in an abstract way that the ex-boyfriend is getting married sometime this year, but a mutual friend confirmed last night, in the midst of another friend's birthday bash, that the wedding is happening this summer. I didn't ask for or get specifics: even this, somehow, was too much (compounded as it was by hours of drinking), and I found myself sobbing all melodramatic-like on a balcony in the middle of Astoria late on a blustery Saturday night.

We just didn't work, the ex-boyfriend and I, despite loving each other intensely (albeit in our own twisted ways). He joked once, a few months after he left, that eventually we would have killed each other. But the sad truth is that it was no joke, and that we brought out indescribable rages in each other, and that he was stronger than me, and that I would have let him.

Here then is the truth of it, the kernel at the heart of my failure to fully move on from him: I would have stayed.

I am glad that he has found happiness and I am even more glad that I have found happiness, and the beginnings of a certain peace that was impossible to imagine during the years that we were together. But there is a piece of me that shatters still every time we interact, every time I hear of his upcoming wedding, every time I see him from across a room; that same part of me, I suppose, that never would have found the strength to leave, even had my life depended on it.