I phone her and we meet and I tell her what I’ve been thinking lately and she says I’m crazy and she loves me and was thinking the same thing about herself to me, that she’s not good enough for me, not intelligent and insightful and pretty enough and other things, and if I want—”Well is this what you want, because it’s what I want, let’s get married, let’s have a baby, let’s live together, do everything forever together, or as much as we can do together, okay?” I said yes and that’s where we stand today.
I phone her and we meet and I tell her what I’ve been thinking and she says she’s afraid she’s been thinking the same thing lately, the relationship should probably end now before it gets even more serious for me and where she’d have to end it on her own rather than do it mutually as we can do now, and I put my hand out to shake hers, she said “Oh don’t be silly,” and kissed me on the lips and I turned around and walked home and cried inside just about all the way and that’s where it stands today.
I phone her and she’s not in but I get her later and we meet and talk and she says it’s not that she’s too good for me or the other way around or even that we might just be perfectly suited for one another or anything like that but that there’s another man in her life, one of the ones she might have mentioned before, she hasn’t seen him since a few months before we started seeing each other a half year ago, but he called last week and said he’s thought and thought about why their relationship ended and all the things she said would improve it then but at the time he didn’t believe in, well anyway, he now goes along with everything she said and knows she was definitely right for him just as she is now and just as he still thinks and hopes and even prays he’s still right for her and he wants to give their relationship another chance if it isn’t too late and also if it isn’t too late to move back in with her. She’s afraid she still loves him, she said to me, and that her feelings for him the last six months are probably what always kept her a little held back and unrelaxed and withdrawn from me at times. I said I never noticed her being any of these ways with me particularly but if there is this other man and she’s in love with him and wants to resume things and so on, well there’s nothing I can say, can I? especially after I already said I’ve been feeling for weeks she’s just too good for me in so many ways. That’s just not true, she said.
She’s not like that at all. If it wasn’t for this other man she knows we could have worked out in time and had a wonderful relationship. There’s just no saying how far we could have gone. That I have everything she ever wanted in a partner, everything, but just that this man is someone who has, not more than me, it’s not that he’s better or brighter or handsomer or anything like that, and actually on many of those things I do even better than he, but just something mysterious she can’t quite explain or communicate and maybe it’s ridiculous trying to explain it because it is so mysterious, but just something, and for all she knows it could be just his being there before me and suddenly leaving while she was still very much in love with him and didn’t want him to go and also because of everything they went through, and what those things were she doesn’t want to go into. But that’s it, she’s sorry, in some ways she wishes he never came back so we could have continued our relationship and she could have seen how it developed and in time perhaps lived with me and maybe even got married and had a child or two if that’s what it would have come to, but in some ways she’s very glad of course, and she has to be honest about it, very very glad he came back, though also of course what she regrets most is how it will affect me. “But don’t be silly,” she said. “I was certainly good enough for you and you were more than good enough for me.” We shook hands and kissed and I left her at a street corner and crossed the street and turned around when I got to the other side and saw her walking the opposite way from me and she didn’t do what she usually did when we left one another on a street — turn around and look back and wave — she kept going, till I couldn’t see her anymore, till she was part of the big midafternoon crowd walking both ways on the sidewalk. I went home and was surprised I didn’t feel as bad as I thought I would.