Hope keeps us going, they say. But what they conveniently forget is that hope can sometimes build unrealistically optimistic expectations. They don’t tell you that when these don’t get fulfilled, you feel like you’ve fallen into a void and that there’ll be no end to it. They also don’t tell you that the void is something that you will laugh at 5 years from now. That you will get out and smile again and that you will still continue to hope. The cynic in me did not let me hope. Even though I thought, ‘This is too good to be true, and it may not work out the way I want it to’, I decided to hope, and keep hoping.
Of course, it didn’t work. But I enjoyed feeling the way I did through it all. The thrill, the unknown and even the awkwardness and yet I am bitter. I am bitter that for you, ‘we’ never existed. You were sad it didn’t work out because you had to go through the process again. You were too sissy to admit it didn’t work out to my face, because ‘you’ would be uncomfortable.
So even though you decided to make an effort till the end, I decided to give up on you. If there’s no ‘us’ in the way you think, I don’t want to be with you. If your heart does not do somersaults when you see me, I don’t want to dress up for you. If you don’t look at me every now and then and think, ‘wow, this is so special,’ I don’t want to walk by your side. If thinking about us is ‘hard work’ and ‘pressure’, I want to walk away. We are great on paper. Both intelligent, both good looking, both our family backgrounds almost similar and there are a lot of other things in common, but where are the tza-tza-tzous? Well, I was hoping they’d come because I felt like doing things for you, I looked forward to seeing you all along while you stressed about us meeting, about what would be the outcome.
I stressed too. I am a commitment phobic, I admit it, but with you I saw some hope. There we go again, hope. It does strange things to you. It makes you go into the rut of rewinding every single moment and wonder why things didn’t work the way you wanted them to?
I don’t wonder. We were two pieces of a puzzle that didn’t fit. But I want to thank you, because if it weren’t for you, I would never have known what I didn’t want. When it comes to relationships, knowing what you don’t want is the most underrated thing.