A Love Story Like None Other

Sometimes I still can’t believe how it all happened.

Not even the most seasoned screenwriter could have written a story like this—

the slow seduction, the rise of hope and fantasy,

the shared life built on illusions, the detonation,

and the merciless precision of its timing.

Because if it had happened at any other time,

maybe it wouldn’t have detonated the way it did.

But it happened while my father was dying—

while I was watching the man who raised me fade from this world,

while I was holding his hand with one

and clinging onto hope and belief in fractured love with the other.

And just days after his last breath,

I found out that the man I loved—

the one who said I was safe, cherished, chosen—

had been living deep, deliberate lies the entire time.

That moment didn’t just break my heart.

It fractured my sense of reality.

It was an atomic-level rupture—

a collision of grief and betrayal so violent

it rearranged something in my soul.

I remember standing there,

my body still in this world,

my inner gladiator on high alert,

but my spirit suspended somewhere between them—

between the living and the lost,

the innocent and the knowing.

It wasn’t just that everything collapsed.

It was that the world I believed in died,

and I was left standing in its ashes,

searching for something—anything—still true.

Now I wonder,

What if it had all unfolded differently?

What if the timing had been kinder?

What if he had come to the hospital before everything fractured?

What if I hadn’t blocked him

after he chose a beer and a phone call over me

in a moment when I was breaking?

What if I hadn’t run into her at the airport—

the woman who had been warning others about him, for me, from the start—

and her words hadn’t pushed me to reach out,

to ask the questions that would unlock everything I didn’t want to know?

What if he hadn’t moved on so quickly?

What if I hadn’t gone no contact?

What if I had never mailed the bill?

What if he had paid it?

What if he had simply texted hi?

What if I had kept my writings private,

and protected the parts of him I still loved?

What if—after the tidal wave in the loading zone—

he had just said, I’m sorry?

Each what if is its own echo—

a glimpse of the life experiences that shaped us,

the reflexes we mistook for love, protection, or ‘I’m fine.’

the fears we didn’t know had a name or a face.

The reality is,

Any one of those choices

might have led us down a different path—

one where the story didn’t end in silence,

where grief didn’t merge with betrayal and abandonment,

where I didn’t have to write myself out of the ashes.

But that isn’t the story we chose.

And choices matter.

We were both human—

shaped by timing, fate, and the deeply engrained patterns

we didn’t yet have the ability or the willingness to break.

Maybe that’s how destiny works—

revealing what love alone could never teach.

Ultimately,

He turned away.

And I turned toward myself.

The collapse forced clarity.

The pain demanded purpose.

The devastation became the doorway

That I unwillingly walked through.

And though I still wonder sometimes—

about the timing, the choices, the roads not taken—

I know this much:

I didn’t lose myself in the wreckage.

I found her. I can't believe either of us has walked away untouched—

by the timing that shaped us,

the fate that bound us,

and the choices that still echo between us.

All of it led here,

To a love story like none other.