Drawing apart after all that time proved to be surprisingly anticlimactic. Or maybe it shouldn’t have been much of a surprise, at that. He always said that getting married wouldn’t change the way he felt about her, but would instead be a confirmation of his feelings. Maybe separating was the same way. So much of the joy was gone by that time, leaving just enough behind to make those moments of bliss exquisitely sad with the weight of memory.
He mused that the saddest part of it was that she was no longer unqualified in his view. She wasn’t Good with a capital G anymore, and he didn’t Love her the way he had before. He loved her, sure, but in the kind of way that made him shake his head and shrug when he thought about it. He loved her, present tense, and Loved her, past tense, and if that didn’t make sense to him, it never seemed to confuse his friends when he launched into a rambling explanation at midnight on some random Tuesday. There was a change, making no damn sense to himself but perfectly clear to the rest of the world. The kind of thing he would have laughed about with her, not so long ago.
He had never been unaware of her faults, not exactly. They were always recognized, but somehow irrelevant, mentally placed into the category of character quirk without a second thought. He wondered if his virtues had been placed into the same category in her mind, dismissed as immaterial. And which was the greater sin, to ignore merit or flaw? Maybe it was the same thing, in the end, to let your lover’s characteristics slide from your notice. If it was so easy to overlook one part of them, could the rest be far behind? Could it ever be healthy, in the interests of love or Love, to pretend only part of her existed?
Maybe this new thing, whatever it was, would become the friendship they deserved to have with each other long ago. She was no longer unqualified, but maybe she never should have been in the first place.
5 January 2002