Everyday, thousands of strangers meet unfamiliar eyes. Sometimes they bump shoulders and apologize, sometimes they hold the door for each other and exchange shy, awkward smiles. Every now and then, these strangers becomes acquaintances, or friends, or maybe more.
You usually know, after the first or second time you meet someone, whether or not you will get along, or sometimes it takes a little longer, perhaps, after your first visit to their house where you stumble upon their collection of beastiality-related sex toys. The point is, it's usually early in the acquainting process that you decide whether or not you want to pursue a relationship, whether it be friendly or otherwise.
However, sometimes this moment doesn't come until years down the track. Perhaps, you knew this person from the freckles on their elbows, to the story where they tripped walking up the stairs at their high school graduation. You knew them and they knew you. And maybe, you trusted them. And maybe, they were honourable. But more time passes and slowly you are worn down, and there are too many times where you should have realized the relationship wasn't meant to be, you see that in retrospect.
Suddenly, you can't stand the way they tap music on the table when they're happy, or how nonchalant they are towards physical affection (oblivious to your discomfort), or the fact that they become infatuated by the ever-changing colour of your fingernails (so you stop painting them), or the way tut-tut at you for insisting on taking the time to make home-made pizzas for games-night when it would have been more efficient to just get it delivered. It's little things like that, which slowly wear you down.
It's not that any of those behaviours are bad, per say, it's just that they affect you. In the same way that some people get chills down their spine when you scratch a blackboard, or don't like pumpkin. It's personal preference.
Maybe you're whole life you have been completely unfazed by clowns but all it takes is one unsettling horror film and suddenly kid's birthday parties make you want to run and hide.
And when you come to this realization; it's scary. You try to figure out how it all fell apart; if it's possible to still build a sculpture from the ruins, if perhaps it was you with a chisel and hammer, slowly chipping away at the relationship, or if it was them, or the weather, with it's acid rain, corroding it away.
In the end, you'll discover that relationships are not always permanent; people come and go. You have left people wounded, too, and maybe you hadn't known either. That won't change the fact that it still hurts, the emotional loss of someone. And is the pain temporary, too? I don't know.
