Breaking Unbreakable Things

I used to be this unbreakable thing.

Harder than a diamond.

Immovable. Unstoppable. A stone which could no sooner be chiseled than the sun extinguished and knocked out of the sky.

It was a good life. I was comfortable in it. I feared nothing and no one. Even death, that most final of all fates, earned only my smirks.

And then I met a girl.

It was an accidental thing, our encounter. I was moving blithely through my easy, well-planned existence. She was a beam of sunshine shining through an otherwise perfect cover of somber grey clouds. She lived far, far away. I thought distance, if nothing else, would provide me armor against any possibility of emotion.

Fool is he who believes the arrow cannot reach him across the field.

And unwise is the man who stands beneath the storm while lightning flashes over his head.

We only talked at first. A few tentative words here. A nervous, self-conscious photo there. The world of our conversation was brittle, fragile, and measured by mere fractions of our words.

But more importantly it was honest. Though I was four decades deep in life, and weathered to the bone by the ghosts of my past, I was enduring. I’d never really loved before. Growing up alone in the shadow of a broken family and deep poverty had seen to it I didn’t know what it was to be comfortable. I’d been married, but only on paper. I’d never been hugged. Or supported. Or shown anything more than the most fractious and forced of emotions.

And in this independence, I thrived. Making one’s mark in the throes of freedom is easiest, and learning to fend for oneself is best done in the company of no one.

And yet…

This, I didn’t know…

Freedom isn’t always what it seems.

And independence shouldn’t be mistaken for happiness.

When I met this girl, I was years removed from a doomed marriage, and many months removed from even the most basic of romantic encounters. I’d carved my way through several shallow relationships, and always my partners knew it.

‘You’re not really here,’ they’d say.

‘You’re off in the clouds,’ they’d ruminate.

‘Goodbye.’

And of course, I never minded these endings. The movement of people through my life was no more lasting than breezes on otherwise motionless days. I tried at these small entanglements. I gave them my best. But they eluded me. And always, they ended the same.

Swiftly.

Painlessly.

And without effort.

But then came ‘the one.’

She came to me with new ideas. New questions. New thoughts.

She had tangled hair. Two sons. An un-simple life. A story different…and yet not so different…than my own.

And although at first it seemed a chance encounter destined to end like the others, I found my mind in a state of rebellion.

‘Don’t write this person off,’ I thought. ‘Never, ever write her off.’

‘Listen to her, because she is smarter than you.’

‘Hear her, because she is funnier than you.’

‘Be careful, or else you’ll do something unlike yourself.’

‘You’ll fall. And then what will you do?’

We talked. And talked. And talked. Brick by brick, the walls of my castle began to crumble. The towers, once so mighty, tilted dangerously close to falling. She wasn’t charming or beautiful on purpose. She just was.

I resisted. Not consciously, but by nature.

And yet to no avail.

Within mere weeks, my walls lay in ruin. My preconceived notions of love and happiness were altered. The moats, once so deep around my heart, were filled in with the mortar of friendship, connection, and eventually love. Every ping of my phone, I hoped was her. Every email, I desired nothing more than to see her name.

It lasted many months. At some point, on a date still unknown to me, I conceded to the unstoppable force of emotion welling inside my chest. I began to think of nothing besides her. I craved only the next text message. The next email. The hope of a long-lasting phone call…one I hoped would never end. These are the things which keep our long-distance love alive, I believed. And I told myself I would do them for eons…if only to earn some small chance of being with her forever.

These feelings were so unlike myself. I knew it even as I felt them. I wasn’t this soft, malleable thing, or so I believed. As my friends’ relationships crumbled, their marriages turned to dust, and their hearts snapped every other month, I told myself I was the strongest lighthouse in an ocean of hurricane gales.

Unbreakable, I believed my heart. Except on the altar of her.

But with new feeling came new peril.

And the things everyone else had already learned through years of anguish were yet unknown to me. Pain, through well-known to the world around me, seemed a far-off concept.

Something I’d never have to face.

Something unreal.

But…

We know how this story goes, don’t we? It’s almost always the same.

In my case, the girl began to doubt my faraway love. She searched for ghosts, she became suspicious of my feeling, and as surely as night falls she came to the conclusion everything between us was not as real as we’d thought.

There was no one else, and yet she convinced herself otherwise.

The small collisions of my unremarkable past became titanic in her eyes, things both dark and sinister.

No explanation I offered could break the shield she suddenly lifted.

Distance, once our ally in a friendship slowly-developed, somehow became an enemy. An ocean we couldn’t cross. A great, dark sea full of doubt, misunderstanding, and shadows.

And with every passing day, the rock I once had been began to crack.

Gone was the castle, the moat, and the lighthouse tower. All that remained was time, endless time. The hours I’d reserved for daydreaming of love and future happiness were corrupted by powers unknown…and unstoppable.

And then…

All words stopped between the girl and the boy. Needless, it seemed, and pointlessly cold. But stop, they did. The hours once filled with laughter went dark, and the friendly ping of eager messages went silent.

In the end, it seems a powerful lesson learned.

So quickly.

So permanently.

And now I know…

There are no castles which cannot be felled.

No towers which cannot be knocked down.

For all the armor we wear, we are vulnerable. To many arrows…or to one.

And while I am stronger now, and far wiser, I wish I’d learned this lesson far sooner in life.

…so that I wouldn’t have to experience it now.