Does everyone go through a moment like this? Dragging a painful conversation while a crappy band is playing Hey Jude in the background and waitresses in green shirts are passing by? How do you move on from something like this? How do you throw away four and a half years of your life? Pack them in boxes, ship them away, and just carry on with your life as if they never existed? What will you do if one morning you wake up and it hits home: you finally realise that everything’s gone, your life has taken another course, and you have become a stranger in your own world? When did you start wanting other things? How did you turn into this other person?
Maybe the only thing that’s different is the cast, not the story. Maybe you will move on. Maybe later, maybe not ever. Life will go on, whether you’re ready or not. Maybe you will carry those baggages for as long as you live, because you will never forgive yourself for what you have done. Maybe you will wake up one morning with everything you have ever wanted, but this. This, you will never ever get to have back. Maybe you’ll look back at this moment and wonder whether you made the right decision. Maybe you did, maybe you didn’t – you won’t get the luxury of finding out. Everything happens only once: your every decision, every step, every move. Once you take it, it’s over, done, and there’s nothing you can do about it but suck it in and accept the consequences.
I stared at you as I sat there.. and I just knew.
***
The Portuguese call it “saudade”: a longing for something so indefinite as to be indefinable. Love affairs, miseries of life, the way things were, people already dead, those who left and the ocean that tossed them on the shores of a different land—all things born of the soul that can only be felt.
- Barnacle Love, Anthony De Sa
