Grieve and Greet

My phone's alarm went off, as I reached to turn it off, I read the reminder that flashed across the screen: today is your birthday.

For weeks, I anticipated this event, wondering if I will get to greet you, if circumstance will allow me to say happy birthday to you. I honestly thought I would, especially since I heard you were back. I even thought that maybe that was the reason you came back, so close to your birthday. I'm remembering the last time we were together and as I told you that that would be the last time we would spend time together, you whispered, "there's still my birthday."

Yet I was told earlier, you had come yesterday and already gone. There was no phone call, no request to see me, nothing at all. Then it finally hit me: we really are over.

Not that I never really thought of us being in that state. After all, it's been seven months since we saw each other last and four months since we spoke. But somehow I thought you would always come back. It was only a matter of time, that you were only biding your time. Little did I realize that time had finally run out for us.

I'm recalling a line from Graham Greene's End of the Affair. Sara writes in her diary: "I might have taken a lifetime spending a little love at a time, eking it out here and there, on this man and that. But even the first time, we spent all we had."

Have we really spent everything that we had?

Can we ever go back, even halfway?

I write this entry because I'm unable to reach you, though I hope my words will find a way to you in some way or another. And if by some strange twist of fate that it does, know that I remembered you, on this day and always.