Forever Between Us (A Sequel to "The Dreams Between Us")

Four years is a long time to live with a decision you still believe in and still regret at the same time. It's long enough to build routines around it. Long enough to trade humidity for rain, palm trees for evergreens, one coast for another. Long enough to become somebody else everywhere except inside your own damn head. I learned how to exist inside the life I chose-inside the dream I worked for since I was a kid. I just never learned how to stop measuring it against the life I walked away from.
I ended things.
I remind myself of that often, as if being the one who said the words first somehow makes the aftermath cleaner.
I didn't break up with Blakely because I stopped loving her. I broke up with her because loving her started to feel like I was standing in front of her light, blocking it without meaning to. Every time my name came up, her accomplishments followed like a footnote. Every headline about me being the first overall pick in the draft, my future, my trajectory came with her quietly tucked behind it. The girlfriend. The swimmer dating the hockey player. I loved her too much to be the reason she looked back one day and wondered who she could've been. But inside, I silently prayed that if we were meant to find our way back to each other, we would-once things settled, once the noise died down.
It sounded brave. It felt like tearing myself in half.
A week after we broke up, the world continued to do what it always does: it kept moving. She moved home to Los Angeles to chase water and world records and the kind of discipline that borders on obsession. I moved to Tampa to chase the dream I've been after since I first laced up a pair of skates. Distance made it easier to pretend we were okay. We weren't.