BE ON CLOUD UNIVERSE [END]

ONE LAST TIME - BIBLEBUILD

BIBLE POV

"I loved you, you know," i said this quietly, i said it too quietly for him to hear.

Or so i thought.

He smiled at me and my heart lurched in my chest. It went for a leap, but then he spoke and then I knew she wasn't smiling because of what I had said. It was only a smile. Not quite random, but it may as well have been.

"Did you say something?"

I returned the smile with a paper mâché version of a smile, "thanks for this," i said to him.

He shrugged awkwardly, "we always said that we would do it, didn't we?"

"We did," i agreed, and i left the obvious words unsaid. We'd said that we would go for a coffee once the dust on our break up had settled, but we never did. The timing of that coffee was supposed to be weeks, possibly months, but not years and certainly not decades.

Decades.

Where had the time gone?

Somehow, it felt to me like it really had only been a matter of weeks since we'd been together. Nothing had changed, and yet everything had changed. But then, that was how it was with the break up. There was an intensity to our relationship that i had never before experienced. I felt things in a way i'd never knew was possible.

A single shared look conveyed a depth of meaning. Being around each other was just so right, but there was more to it than that. A whole other dimension.

Then it had ended.

I hadn't wanted it to end. That's the way it happens sometimes. It takes two to make a relationship work, it only takes one to end it.

I went to visit him one day and it had all changed before i even got there. Maybe he was exactly the same and it was whatever we had had between us that was gone.

It felt like he'd turned the tap off, pulled up the shutters and gone away for the winter. The structure was still there, but no one was in it and there was nothing going on.

I was stunned.

I didn't know what to do.

Maybe i shouldn't have done anything. Maybe it was a storm and i was supposed to ride it out. One of life's hardest lessons is that sometimes the best thing and the only thing to be done is nothing.

However much you want to do something, you have to still your hand and that's all there is to be done. Doing nothing is an option that is all too easy to overlook, especially in the midst of all the noise and the chaos.

Instead, i tried to appeal to him. I tried to win him back. And when that didn't work i told him how unfair he was being. He never said a word. He never engaged with me. I wanted to at least know why...

Why is a luxury that life seldom affords us, and when it does, we realise that we were asking the wrong question all along.

In the end, i suggested that maybe one day we could go for a coffee and have a chat. He'd agreed to this, but i was conscious of the maybe in my request. I'd made it easy for him to agree to something he would never have to commit to and this was a person who didn't do commitment.

Don't get me wrong, my conclusion wasn't based on him pulling the rug from under me, it was based on her entire life. He'd been dealt some crap cards along the way for sure, but he hadn't done anything about those cards. He carried them with him wherever he went and i wasn't the only one to have been dealt a curve ball by him.

I should have known.

I was a big boy by then and i'd been around the block a few times. But there's always someone who can teach you another lesson or three.