The Ice Age

The day I told you we couldn't be in each other's lives any longer, I played it up like it was a temporary thing, like I just needed a break. But when I was telling you I needed to take some time and that I wanted out, I knew in my heart, it was probably for good. I figured if it was permanent, I wouldn't ever hurt this way again. I told a friend it'd probably be a few million years before we spoke again.

I wasn't trying to be hyperbolic; I really thought that was a fair estimate. Supposedly, humans evolved about two and a half million years ago. Letting you back into my life again would be as much of a colossal undertaking as all of human history. It seems more likely caveman would walk and cities would evolve and the internal combustion engine could be invented long before I got over you enough to send even a smoke signal your way.

But last night, I did. I sent you a text message. Honestly though, I'm pretty sure it has been a million years. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I was just feeling sad and emotional at four in the morning and didn't have the right coping mechanisms to stop myself. Maybe nothing that happened or will happen between us is part of any coordinated or logical trajectory. Maybe the earliest humans weren't ready for everything it meant when they discovered fire. Maybe it just sort of happened.

Maybe that text message was just slipping out of our Ice Age into whatever our next evolutionary period is going to be. Or perhaps I was just lonely. The most important thing I've learned in life is that sometimes, people are so lonely, they'll accept anything they think might ease that isolation and no one is immune. At some point, you will be that person. You will feel so lonely that you would take anything someone else was willing to offer, if it meant you didn't have to be alone anymore. Maybe that's how I felt and, in an attempt to feel connected to someone else, even in some miniscule, indeterminate way, I sent you a text message that only read: I hate this.

Whatever my motivation was, it was true. I do hate this. Even though I'm not sure what "this" means, I know I hate it. I hate what it means to not have you in my life. I hate how often I'm reminded of you, how almost every day holds a token symbol of your existence in the form of a phrase or a place or a mutual friend. I hate the ways you turned out to be callous and duplicitous and I hate remembering the ways you're wonderful and compelling. I hate that I still love you and that I don't seem likely to stop doing so any time soon. So: 'this'. I hate this.

The moment I sent that message, I regretted it. I wished I could somehow transform my body into a wireless signal and swim through cellular space until I caught up to that message and stopped it from arriving. But in these two million plus years, humans never evolved that way and once that message went out into that invisible network that somehow connects us, it was never going to return to me.

I hate that too. Cellular airways aren't the only invisible network binding us together that I don't get to control. I guess emotions are kind of like that. I think love works that way too. As much as I'd like to find a way to move through that intangible space and take back everything that happened between us, I can't. It's out there. It will always be out there.

I don't even know what I would take back. You and I have occupied so many different spaces in our history. You've been a stranger I met at college, someone who became a friend, someone who became part of my group of friends, someone who suddenly had the longevity to be an old friend, and at the end, you became my lover—whatever that means. You became the person with whom I slowly, but very deeply, fell in love. If I were to turn back the evolutionary clock that saw us through our timeline, I don't know how far I'd have to turn it back to make things okay, to divert the catastrophe, to preserve whatever was worth saving.

The day I told you I wanted to be with you, your first response was that a romantic relationship between us would be ultimately destructive. I thought that was a very specific word. You didn't say it was a bad idea or not going to work or that we were incompatible. You said we would become destructive. Destructive seemed carefully selected and uniquely descriptive. On some level, it seemed prophetic, as if you knew exactly what was coming.

I hate that you were right.

I mean, you were and you weren't. We didn't have the type of relationship you thought would be destructive, we didn't evolve that way. You meant a romantic relationship and to be honest, we had sex one night and then I told you I felt strongly for you. That doesn't count as a great romance. Whatever our future might have contained got derailed by your pronouncement. I wanted to try being with you and you wanted us to stay the way we were. I was in love with you and whatever you did or didn't, it didn't matter. You weren't willing to risk our friendship but I knew that chapter was over for us. Once we started sleeping together, once the feelings I had for you came out, there was no going back to being just friends, not even important, significant, wonderful friends. So I did what I thought was best for me and maybe best for you and I told you I needed some time, knowing that I really meant I wanted a permanent separation. What happened was an indelible wound, an injury so severe, it could never fully heal. That injury—or maybe it was my choice—ended all the possibilities our relationship once held.

Of course, maybe I didn't cut anything short. Maybe this was exactly what evolution had planned for us. Maybe annihilation was always our future.

It doesn't matter if that's just the cost of living and loving in a world that's always moving forward, if heartache and the occasional bereavement are just parts of what it means to be human. I still hate it. I hate this.

So I sent you that text message, an attempt to cast a line between two lives that had moved on from one another. I sent it to you at the four in the morning, equal parts drunk, lonely, and human. I sent it to you because in the months we haven't spoken, I haven't stopped missing you and I haven't stopped having things I want to say to you. There are things I want to tell you. I want to tell how angry I am that you made your self-fulfilling, how hurt I am that you didn't see a way to love me like I do you. I want to tell I still love you, that I wish it hadn't turned out this way. I want to tell you every stupid story that's happened to me in the time we've gone without speaking. It's been a long time. I've stopped counting the months. I wanted to tell you I'm hopeful someday we'll fix this and that I worry we never will. I wanted to tell you it doesn't matter that I walked away, because you're still in my life; I still think about you and remember you and that the effect you had on my life is too great to ever replace. You're part of too many places, too many stories, too many memories. I evolved the way I've evolved in no small part because of you.

Somehow, all that came out in that desperate message I sent, overtired and overwhelmed, was, I hate this.

A little time later, or maybe it was a million years (who could tell?), around half past six, my phone woke me up.

Your text message just said: Me too.

There are a couple of theories about how Neanderthals became extinct. One is that the newly evolved Homo sapiens killed them. Another is that they never quite adapted to the Ice Age. I think that's our story too. Something destructive did happen between us and it doesn't matter if that force was you or me or if it was some cataclysmic event in our climate that was entirely beyond our control. Our relationship was destructive—or at least it was destroyed—and there's no changing history.

There's just changing yourself. There's just evolution. And that's slow. It's why I won't respond to your reply, not today anyway, and probably not tomorrow. I haven't adapted yet, haven't discovered how I need to evolve to flourish in a world where you and me aren't a possibility. Maybe I will someday. Maybe that will happen for us.

Check back in another million years.