He’d always acted like he knew what was best for her.

“That boy will break your heart.”

“He doesn’t treat you the same way I would.”

“Does he kiss you like I did?”

His words, the same she cherished for so long, the same words that she would find herself repeating over and over when he would fall into his self-imposed silence—they meant more to her than she realized. Nights when she would watch her ceiling fan rotate, the night changing from black to blue to yellow to plain old bright, she’d remember them.

“I love you.”

“Forever. I have already named our kids.”

“You’re perfect, and you don’t even know it.”

It was always the same predictable script. Her phone would ring, somewhere around 2 a.m. It felt good, feeling like this was bad. Like their relationship was forbidden—a love so deep, the critics could be damned.

It wasn’t that though. He didn’t wait until 2 a.m. to call to feel like he was in the middle of some sort of James Bond movie or stranded on a time-traveling island. In the real world, 2 a.m. is closing time. The barkeep yells out a last call (HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME) and suddenly he can find time in his busy schedule of drinking and debauchery to call the girl he is in love with.

A whispered hello feels like a brand new voice to her. It feels dangerous. It feels like the kind of voice she can imagine herself waking up to years down the road. The neglect was easy to ignore with murmurs of true love and perfection.

The first time she told him to stop calling, they both cried. He’d been—miraculously—sober. The pain in his voice wasn’t masked by fermented grains and she was able to feel exactly as he did.

He’d confessed to her once that he’d always been able to feel what she felt. It had made her feel important.

He’d protested, that first time. But he respected her wishes. He understood the distance and the timing and the general immaturity of them both was a mess to be dealt with—alone, in due time. He was still seeing that blonde anyway, with the brown eyes and the sultry smile. The blonde knew about her, but she didn’t know about the blonde. He was keeping her safe, he justified.

He came back though. He always came back before she left him for good.

Things went back to how they should have been before. Happy. Content. Anticipatory. If she was being honest, things for them always existed in the future-tense.

“As soon as I graduate, it’s you and me babe.”

“I want you to finish school first.”

“I won’t be with her when I can finally be with you, dollface.”

Hindsight proved this to be their ultimate defeat. They had both played out these future instances so thoroughly in their mind, the real thing couldn’t match up.

When he came back the first time, he understood it as a mutual agreement of silence. She didn’t mention it to her friends, who grew to dislike and distrust him more and more each day. He mentioned it once, to his new best friend (his old one died, you see, but he couldn’t seem to settle his old best friend’s memory and instead replaced the pain of missing him with bottles of cheap vodka and blacking out for the weekend.) that she was it for him. He forgot, in his state of inebriation, that they had agreed to be just them, perfect and happy in their imperfect and unhappy relationship.

She never really referred to what they had as a relationship. She never called him her boyfriend. There was never an exchange of official titles. Maybe it was out of fear of ruining their delicate agreement. “A lover I don’t have to love.” More accurately, a love that I don’t owe much to.

She asked him to leave a second time. He complied, this time in anger and a string of curse words.

Never directed at her, though. Blackening her name would have been blasphemy.

He came back after she grew up. She was a woman now—deflowered, in love, embracing her future. Her future was bright—he always knew she would be successful. He was just an undeclared boy compared to her. He was failing most of his classes and would most likely drop out for a few semesters—but she didn’t need to know that. Why hurt her idea of him? Why make her believe she’d be supporting him?

It was then, and only then, that she realized she had the upper hand.

She was mature—much more so than she had been when they were on speaking terms previously. She understood the way he operated. She’d taken enough psychology courses to know that he was projecting his anger and his hurt over the loss of his best friend onto the only person he felt closest to. That she got caught in the crossfire of his indecision and simply being stuck was something she had accepted and sometimes even embraced.

He told her the same things again. He would say the word forever and she would roll her eyes, unbeknownst to him. He’d call at 2 a.m. to chat, eager to hear her voice and be soothed by her words. She’d comply and drag through her early classes, but after so many years of giving in to him what was she supposed to do?

Does the comfort of habit outweigh the feeling of being stifled, or more contrived, protected?

As she listened to him cry at 2 a.m. once more, lamenting about days gone by and the potential of she and him, she realized that comfort is made to be broken.

It’s one thing to accept his drunken slurs at face value. But she’d lost herself the day she started believing them.

See, in his out right abuse of their relationship, he’d found a way to manipulate her very base of self. The very core of her being became a puppet, he the master. It wasn’t intentional, she doesn’t think, but it was crucial to the growth of their relationship.

It was only after a night spent in the dark on a bed that was not hers, next to the boy that lost his innocence and his purity years before, that she realized she could leave. There was no more asking him to walk away. Before, she felt incapable of leaving him alone. If she felt like he left of his own accord, the guilt didn’t eat away as heavily as it would have. If he had…left the earth…it wouldn’t have been because she failed as his best friend and rock and one true love. The guilt of asking him to leave was enough to leave her shielded and wary of any one claiming to be trustworthy. But any more guilt than that, and, well, there is no telling what she may have done.

She awoke the next morning, head pounding and back aching. She’d spent the night in his arms. It was the perfect goodbye for her. She’d never been able to be close with him, and now she could walk away without feeling like she was leaving anything behind. There were no more avenues to discover. Their relationship had never been a stroll down an avenue, anyway.

She drove away, watching him smoke a cigarette in her rear view mirror, and knew that it was the end. Knew that was goodbye. He was unaware. He watched her car to the corner. He looked worried. He’d always been able to read her exceptionally well. She felt things shift that night—he felt it too.

Today, maybe to soothe those cracked portions of her heart that still belong to him (and probably will always belong to him) she tells herself it was for the better.

Loving someone peripherally is easier than loving someone wholly.