This Was Meant To Be

Silly, she told herself, she was silly to feel so nervous. She had broken up with him. If he wasn’t there when she woke up, it was no big deal.

But she had expected him to be there. She had expected him, no matter what, to fight for her – at least a bit.

She had given him something of an ultimatum. Maybe there had been some part of her that had hoped that he would finally think of a compromise, when faced with the reality of losing her.

Had she really meant so little to him that he didn’t care about that? Leigh didn’t want to think that.

Staring at the note wasn’t helping anything, anyway. Leigh opened it, and read.

Dear Leigh,

I thought about what you said, and you’re right. This is important to me, and I will resent you if you don’t do this with me. Maybe the best thing to do is to take a break from each other.

But this will be a new life for me. Without sharing in these experiences with me, how can you know me afterwards? If we meet after I come back, I will be a different person, while you will still be you.

You will still be concerned with your career, and professional advancement. I hope to find something bigger and higher than that. I hope to find a place where I can have real peace, maybe even make a difference.

How will you know me after I come back?

What if I find my kindred spirit, who seeks riches in experience and not through her career? I would rather have the freedom to find the woman who understands me, than wait for you to understand why this matters so much to me.

I know you think that I’m being unreasonable. But this was an experience for both of us, a way for both of us to change in ways that would make us so much better than we were.

I still believe you and I could be meant to be together, if you reconsider your priorities. But if you have made up your mind, then you’re right. We need to part ways.

I hope you will get in touch with me, Leigh, and tell me that you’ve changed your mind. I hope for that, with all my heart, for your sake as well as mine. You are losing sight of what’s important, what we both agreed was important.

I’m staying with Jack for a few days, but I’ll book my tickets at the end of the week. I hope you will call me before that, so that I can book for both of us, like we always planned.

Take care, Leigh. I’ll be waiting all week.

Carl

Leigh read it a couple of times to be sure that she hadn’t gotten it all wrong or misinterpreted it.

No, she really hadn’t.

He hadn’t heard a word she’d said, in the end. Not about compromise, not about working on their relationship, not about finding a way to make it work – nothing.

He was parroting the same old thing, all over again, and this time, apparently it was for her own good. She was just surprised that he hadn’t called her toxic and leaching away his positivity, or something of the sort.

Leigh sat there, feeling numb, wondering where her anger was.

She wondered where the man she had been in love with had gone. Because she had been in love with him. She had fallen in love with him, and she had thought that she had found the one.

Well, if the one was an idiot with his head up his ass, she sure had found him.

Leigh wished she could feel bitterness, but she couldn’t. She just felt nothing.

The pain would come, she knew, because that note meant that everything between them was over. He had thrown the last compromise she had offered back in her face, pretty much telling her that he didn’t want to see her after he came back and see where things stood.

He was giving her an ultimatum to top the one she had given him.

Leigh recognized the manipulation, of course, and she knew that that was his way of making her come to heel again, put what he wanted first again.

Give everything up for him.

Leigh closed her eyes and considered that seriously for a minute.

Maybe she could.

But she couldn’t stay with a man who had such little regard for her that he refused to meet her halfway. Or even a quarter of the way.

What kind of life would that be? She would have to keep bending over backwards, prioritizing his wishes over her own, all her life.

No, she couldn’t do that.

No matter how much it might hurt when she started feeling again, she had to let this go.

Leigh considered tearing the note up, but that seemed like an empty gesture. She put it aside and walked to the kitchen.

Methodically, she got coffee started and got a bowl out to have cereal.

She saw that it was Carl’s favorite. She had always bought Carl’s favorite.

Everything seemed to slowly break inside her, and tears came flooding. Slowly, she sank onto the floor, her back against the kitchen cabinet. She rested her forehead on her knees and wrapped her hands around her legs, and she let herself cry – for everything she had hoped would be, for everything that now never would be, for the realization that her hopes and dreams had been built on shifting sand, and would never have been, anyway.

*****

Harrison looked at his phone, annoyed. He still had work to get through.

But he saw that was Leigh and the annoyance vanished. Work could wait.

“Leigh, hello.”

Pleasure ran through his words.

“Harrison…”

Leigh’s voice broke on a sob. Harrison’s grip on his phone tightened.

“Leigh, what’s wrong? Where are you? Are you all right?”

He heard her sniff.