1998 (ish)

“Please… please come. I know you two are over, but… she needs you right now. She’s had too much to drink, and… I think she might have taken something.”

Her roommate, normally hostile and evasive, is anxious. This is not a call I was expecting, but even still it has the desired effect. I know in my heart that I have no business going over there, but moments after hanging up the keys are in my hand and I am walking outside my Connecticut home to my car in the drive.

I arrive to find her in rough shape, though not nothing life-threatening. My great, passionate collegiate relationship (now dead due to her drug addiction despite my every faith and effort) is laying on the floor of their living room. I talk to her, and find the worst thing she’s taken that night is one drink too many. I calm the roommate, then help her to her feet and up the stairs to her room.

She staggers into her room, and slumps down in the centre of the floor, curled on her side. I sit down next to her, calming her murmurings, telling her she is going to be fine. A monstrous hangover awaits her, I say, nothing worse. She has nearly passed out, but she calls my name until I lean in and tell her I am right there.

“I want… to tell you…” she begins, almost at the point of losing consciousness. “I have… always loved… you. You’ve always… been here for me. I never… recognised… that.”  

“I know,” I reply, rubbing her shoulder until she passes out. I take the blanket from her bed, and drape it over here. I take the pillow, and place it beneath her troubled head. Then I stand. “I know,” I say again, before I stand up. I look down at her for a moment. So many hopes, so many dreams, so much time wasted achieving neither.

I walk out of the room, and passing by her roommate without a word. It was the last time I ever saw her.

2009

Mo Chroi is tired, and the few drinks we’ve had have not helped matters any. Amelie has just finished playing on the tele, and she is ready for bed.

She makes her own way into her bedroom, not really hers but that of the person she is currently living with who is herself away for the evening. I finish tidying up the living room and gathering my things, before going in to say my goodbye.

I lean in to kiss her on her head, resting on her pillow with the blanket half covering her.

“I love you,” I tell her.

“You’re crazy,” comes her tired reply.

“Why am I crazy?”

“You’re crazy… because you love someone… who’s insane.”

I lean down and kiss her again. There’s a few moments’ quiet.

“I’m head over heels in love with you,” she says.

I want to cry as I hear it. Partly because it has been so long since I’ve heard such words from her. And partly because I know that, in the end, it means nothing. Mo Chroi and I have danced our way to the exit for over two months now, each trying to get away at times only to be drawn back in to something we cannot seem to let go of. I love her as I have loved no other, but I have learned now that sometimes love is just not enough.

In a day or two’s time, Mo Chroi will hate me again. She will be angry with me, and while she has good and compelling reason for some of her anger, she will once more be unable or unwilling to see past it. I have cut the ties a few times myself. And for a short time, I am filled with the exhilaration of the possibility of a life of my own, free of her.

And each time, after awhile, that possibility begins to seem more of the less, and less of the more. Perhaps Mo Chroi and I were never meant to be. I cannot help but think of the maudlin malaise that so overtook me when I think of our time together. The feeling that Mo Chroi was too free a spirit to be satisfied by what I had to offer her.

And then I think, again, how seemingly impossible our love was. Of the conviction that there was something more behind it than the either of us realised, and to turn away from that is to cop out. That at our best, we would build one another up, complement our respective weaknesses, and be what we were meant to.

And then the regret sets in that neither one of us did that, but rather it’s opposite. And that the failure to work things out now represents not a failure of desire, destiny, or capability… but simply a failure of will. We refused so incredible a gift because we simply were unable to do what was needed to keep it, and how shameful a failing that is.

I stood up and left her side, pausing at her darkened door.

“I love you too, a stor mo choi.”

I walked outside her Kentucky home to my car in the drive.