A Different Kind of Always
We agreed that we owed it to each other to do it in person.
I’d already booked a flight back to Colorado months before, when it had just been a regular visit. We’d hold on until then.
He'd tried to do it over the phone, but I hadn't let him. It was one of the early conversations, when everything still felt reversible-- when between sleeping and waking, I'd still exist for a fraction of a second in a world where we were okay.
I hadn’t yet realized that this was the right thing for me too, but I would. And by the time I got off the plane three weeks later and drove to the town where it had all started, it would be a decision we were making together.
We spent the first day just trying to figure out how to be together in these strange last moments we’d never seen coming. We moved slowly and asked permission and talked everything through. How could you love each other when you’d already decided to leave each other? How could you allow your heart to be as open and full as it had ever been at the close?
I still don’t really know how you do this, I just know that we did.
We woke up next to each other the following morning and had the Saturday we’d had hundreds of times, when it felt like we might do this always. We packed the car and grabbed coffee and breakfast sandwiches at our favorite place. I put my hand on the small of his back in line to pay, he ate my side of grapefruit, we kissed at red lights. We drove up into the mountains listening to Vampire Weekend and put our skis on at the trailhead and headed out into the woods. Everything was the same as it had always been, and yet it wasn’t at all.
Time had twisted and deposited us into an ephemeral universe only we understood, where it made sense that we would end our relationship by spending 48 hours loving each other with more tenderness and tenacity than we ever had. Where there was even a way to do that.
We talked, we stayed quiet, we made jokes about what was happening and cried about what was happening, we celebrated the past and mourned the future.
We remembered sleeping in my car in Telluride on our first road trip, walking up to the cliffs behind my house to climb on spring evenings, him saying I love you for the first time in the dark in a backcountry hut, playing music together in my parents’ living room at Christmas, sitting on my deck reading the cards he’d asked all my friends to write me when I left Colorado.
We mourned the house he would never build us, the dog we would never adopt, the Thanksgivings we would never spend in the desert, the multi-pitch routes we would never climb together, the life in Tahoe we would never share.
We waited to talk about what would happen after this until we were several miles out, in a clearing thick with falling snow. I told him that it would be better if we didn’t talk at all for a while, that if we didn’t fully let each other go, we wouldn’t end up really letting go at all. I watched his face crumple as I said the words get over you, a reminder that knowing something and hearing it out loud are not the same.
We had both come into this with eyes open, knowing what we were getting ourselves into, and yet not having any idea what we were getting ourselves into. We had no roadmap for this situation, no sense of how to navigate this terrain. We both knew how the story would end, but had no idea what it would feel like as it was happening. No one had ever told us it could be like this.
Sitting in the car after skiing, with his hand on my knee and mine on the back of his neck, I felt the kind of blistering awareness that grabs you periodically and reminds you that you are alive and this is your life happening, right now. We were talking in the silly voices we’d reserved for each other and brushing tears out of the hollows of each other’s eyes, we were holding each other’s hands and holding each other’s pain, we were saying I love you and saying goodbye. It didn’t seem possible that all of it could exist together, swirling around in the same space, but it was. We looked at each other in the front seat of the car, the reflection of all of this in the other person’s eyes, our only confirmation that it was real.
I’m so proud of us, he said. I’m so proud of us.
On the drive back to town, he pulled the car off the canyon road so we could cry together, and instantly we were plunged into a foot of crusty brown snow. It looked like dirt, he said. It seemed like it would work.
He hit the gas, trying to plow through it, then reversed, trying to get out of it. The wheels spun. It didn’t matter how many times he reversed or accelerated, or insisted it had looked like dirt. We weren’t going anywhere.
I wiped my nose and got out of the car. We both took our avalanche shovels out of our backpacks and began to dig. It felt good to lose ourselves in an immediate, concrete task.
We dug on either side behind both wheels, tried moving the car again, and went nowhere.
I lay down on the snow on my stomach, looking underneath the car for what might be getting in the way, and realized the car was high-centered. The wheels had dug deep tracks, and the snow in between had remained, scratching the car’s belly and preventing it from moving. Two people, digging as hard as they could around the wheels with good intentions, would still not have gotten anywhere.
We chipped away at the snow in the center from both sides in heavy silence, until the car was ready to reverse out of this space that was not what we thought it had been, and roll off into the darkness.
There had been no way forward, through the mush together. We had gone as far as we were able to go.
He first told me that he would always love me in a letter he gave me when I moved to California, when we promised each other that long distance would just be a season. It was the first time anyone had said it to me, and my eyes stung as I read it on the floor of the Denver airport.
Sometimes when we hear about love, we only hear about the forever kind. We are taught that this is the only kind of love you get points for, the only kind that’s real. That a happy ending is one where the couple stays together. That there’s one kind of always.
There is no possible way to know how our lives will go. There is no possible way to know if we will love one person or many, to know if we will be with someone for a month or a year or a lifetime.
We must be open to the possibility that we could be graced with many different types and shapes and lengths of love in our lifetimes. What if we appreciated love merely for existing? What if we valued it for its quality, not its longevity?
He and I hadn’t been meant to love each other forever, but we had been meant to love each other. What we created together and who we became alongside each other was the meaning of it all. How we let each other go was proof of that.
On the last day, we stood out on the sidewalk and looked at each other, knowing the spell was about to be broken, that it was all about to end.
All morning, we’d sobbed into each other’s collarbones, and found respite in implausible laughter, and walked by the creek, and looked at each other hard, knowing that each time we did something would be the last time. We would never mean more to each other than we did right now.
By the time I had to leave, I realized we’d had the unique privilege of getting to say everything we needed to say. Of getting to support each other through the process of losing each other. Of being afforded the opportunity to prepare ourselves for the inevitable, quiet end.
I love you, we said to each other. I love you, and I always will.
And it was true. Just not the kind of always we had anticipated-- not the kind that is sold in jewelry stores, or that shares a last name, or that grows old together.
It was a different kind of always. An always that would return to us in small, wistful ways over time when we were reminded of each other, a kind of always that would better prepare us for being with someone else, a kind of always that would live within us, but not between us.
A kind of always that is painful and beautiful, impossible and necessary, unbelievable and true, all at the same time.