The Infinite Starr

Eventually, loving them begins to require something crueler than staying.

You let them go.

You stand at a distance and watch them dance with their devil, recognizing the steps because you watched them practice for years. There is a hollowness behind their eyes that you once tried desperately to reach. You stop trying. Not because the love disappeared, but because somewhere along the way you finally understood that love was never supposed to be a rescue mission.

This is usually the part of the story where you become the monster.

You follow your dreams. You make decisions they would never have made. You stop apologizing for wanting more. You leave behind the places where you once made yourself smaller so someone else would not feel abandoned by your growth.

Then one day you are standing in the middle of the very things you once wanted, and instead of wondering why they are not standing beside you, you finally understand why they could never have come this far.

Some journeys require a version of you they never met.

I am somewhere on the back nine of my life now. There is more road behind me than there used to be, and somewhere beyond the trees waits the eternal rest none of us gets to negotiate. That changes the questions you ask.

Love is no longer enough.

Maybe it never was.

You cannot love someone enough to make them believe in your dreams. You cannot make them want your horizon simply because you once watched the same sunrise. Eventually, you become the monster in their story, and they become the ghost in yours.

The person they knew is gone anyway.

They are buried beneath years, decisions, mistakes, victories, funerals, birthdays, addresses, photographs and all the ordinary days nobody thought would matter. Sometimes I think about that particular moment in time when the world still felt new, when falling asleep meant listening to another heartbeat in the darkness until I could no longer tell whether I was hearing theirs or my own.

I remember seeing everything they could become.

That was probably my mistake.

I fell in love with possibility and expected another human being to live there.

Time corrected me.

Time has an ugly habit of touching everything we beg it to leave alone. It changes people. It changes places. It changes the meaning of old conversations. It turns houses into somebody else’s home and familiar roads into places you drive past without slowing down.

It even changes memories.

Tonight the moon is full.

I looked up at it and wondered whether somewhere, under this same enormous sky, the ghost was looking at it too.

That is the confession I do not usually make.

The ghost still visits.

Not often enough to frighten me, but often enough that I recognize its presence. Sometimes I ask what it wants. I ask why, after all these years, it continues following me through a life it was never part of.

The ghost never answers.

So I talk anyway.

I tell it that I am happy now.

I tell it all those terrible things I once worried might happen never did. I tell it the universe has taken remarkably good care of me. I tell it about places it has never seen and people whose names would mean nothing to it. I tell it that life became enormous after I stopped being afraid of losing the small piece of it I thought I could not survive without.

The strangest part is that I can still feel the love inside the hate and the hate inside the love.

Perhaps some people never completely leave us. They simply lose their bodies in our stories.

The house sold.

The dog died.

Years passed.

I have stood in places we never imagined existed. I have lived what feels like a million different lives since then. I have met extraordinary people. I built a family around myself from blood, friendship, circumstance, loyalty and love. I became someone that neither of us would have recognized back when the future was still something we whispered about before falling asleep.

And every once in a while, the ghost returns.

Tonight I asked it something different.

Was it worth it?

The room stayed quiet.

Of course it did.

Ghosts are terrible conversationalists.

I looked back at the moon and realized I did not need an answer anymore.

Becoming the monster was the best and worst thing that ever happened to me.

Because monsters survive the endings that ghosts spend eternity haunting.