It had been easy in a way he wasn’t used to. No tension. No games. She made him feel like himself in a way he didn’t know he had stopped feeling.
He panicked sometime around the third month. He couldn’t say exactly why. He told her he needed space. She gave it to him.
He spent the next year trying to find what he’d had with her in other people. He didn’t find it. He’s not sure he will.
Some of us run precisely when something good arrives. Not because we don’t want it. Because it feels too real. Too close. Too much like something we could lose. The things that don’t matter much we can hold without tension. The things that matter, we sometimes have to ruin first before we can admit we wanted them.
I know something about this. Not the same story. But the shape of it. The way a good thing can feel threatening because good things end, and we have learned that ending is the most certain part.
He left. She moved on. He is still, somewhere in the back of all of it, in that third month when everything was easy and he got scared.
He knows what he did. He’s not sure he knows why.
And I keep wondering: if he had it again, would he stay?
Fear of good things is its own kind of wound. It comes from somewhere. It usually comes from the times good things didn’t last.
He wasn’t broken. He just learned early that the safe thing was not to need too much. And then something came along that he needed. And the old lesson kicked in before the new one had a chance.
He looks for her in people who are nothing like her. That’s the part he can’t explain to himself.
Some things worth sitting with:
- Have you ever walked away from something good and not been able to explain why?
- What do you do when something feels too right, too real, too close?
- Is there a version of love or connection you’ve been choosing because it feels safer to want less?
You might also find yourself in He Flew Home for the Funeral. He Cried More Than He Expected..
Inspired by a real story shared anonymously online.