Someone's Someone

Someone's Someone - Chapter Forty Three

Danny....

My life has all been handed back to me. I have everything again.

It's just like it used to be. My life how it once successfully was, has allowed me to just slip right back into it. Allowed me to return to all that I used to know.

So why does it all feel like nothing?

Why does it no longer feel enough?

Everything is the same; only I am not. I've changed. Everything feels different now. All that I used to be and all that I used to have, pales into sad insignificance against Henna. I'm trying so hard to be the Danny Oneal I was before her, but it just isn't happening.

I don't think I can be him.

I don't think he even exists anymore.

No matter where I am, what I am doing, or who I am with—I am thinking about Henna.

From the outside looking in, I probably just look like the jammy bloke who has somehow landed back on his feet again. But inside, I'm a mess. A lonely mess. I miss Henna. I miss the me I was when I was with her. I miss how good we were when we were together. I guess, I just miss us.

The us that happened so naturally.

The us that could have been so much more.

The us that really should still be an us.

The worst part about it all, is Henna won't reply to my texts. I know she's ignoring them, and I know why. She's not being stubborn or being petty or spiteful; she's merely protecting herself.

Henna loves hard. She loves infinitely.

Although she loves me, she can't love me from afar. She's a woman who needs her man with her, and I chose not to be. And that decision is slowly killing me inside. The thought of not being the man who gets to forever be by her side, is slowly squeezing the life out of all the reasons why I came back to Coulsdon—dad, Nathan and the business.

I know that my brother and my father are both pleased to have me home. They're both pleased to have me back at the helm of the Hemel Hempstead branch, but something feels wrong about my being here. It constantly nags away at me. Constantly sits inside of me like a heavy rock. You could say, I'm quietly unhappy.

Which then makes me feel incredibly guilty. I have my family and my life back, yet it's not making me happy. The woman I love is in Bristol, thinking that I left her. That again, makes me feel depressingly guilty.

The frustrating part about all of this sorry mess, is that mine and Henna's love is being torn apart by circumstances surrounding us.

My father is recovering from a minor stroke, my brother has been pulled in many different directions and Henna's entire life is rooted in Bristol. All of those things are preventing us from being together. And you know what? It's slaughtering me.

I love Henna.

She loves me.

Yet I am here.

And she is there.

None of this makes sense. None of it. I know I can't keep going on like this. I know I can't let the best thing to have ever happened to me, to simply slip from out of my life.

Henna fell in love with me when I was nothing.

She loved and supported me, when I had nothing but my love to give her in return. I owe her so much more than that, so much more than that.

I'm an intelligent man. I have to think about things intelligently.

If I'm not happy, then I need to think about what will.

If I'm wanting to be with Henna, I need to think about how that can happen.

I am a man, and this is my life.

As a man, I am taking back full control of that life.