There She Is

Dear Me,

Today you saw her with someone else.

You already knew she would find someone quickly; people gravitate toward her. She’s warm, outgoing, interested. She has a way of making someone feel specifically wanted.

You know because once, that someone was you.

And that’s why seeing her with someone else made you go home and cry today.

It wasn’t jealousy. It didn’t mean you wanted her back. It doesn’t mean you regret ending the marriage. It will be the recognition of someone you thought was gone forever - who is gone forever, but only for you.

You’ll see her laughing with him, leaning toward him, interested in what he’s saying, visibly happy that he’s there. Maybe it will be something tiny that nobody else would even notice.

But you will. And you’ll think:

Oh. There she is.

Because you’ll recognize the girl you remember.

The girl who once looked at you that way.

The girl whose warmth made you fall in love with her in the first place.

What hurt toward the end wasn’t that she had lost that quality. It was realizing that she still possessed it, but somewhere along the way, she didn’t feel like you were worth spending it on anymore.

That was when things ended. The divorce was just the paperwork.

What you saw today was the fresh version of something you remember intimately. He gets to feel chosen by her. Wanted by her. Interesting to her. He may have absolutely no idea that the way she’s looking at him is something you could recognize from across a room - that you did recognize from across the room, for many years.

You aren’t crying now because you wish for the marriage back. You’re grieving something that was real and disappeared: what it once felt like to be wanted by her.

Seeing that part of her come alive for somebody else won’t erase why the marriage ended. It won’t make the relationship that actually existed at the end acceptable. It won’t make the two of you compatible again.

You were once the person she turned toward.

You remember what that felt like.

And when you see her turn toward somebody else, you’ll know immediately what you’re looking at.

Oh.

There she is.