“It is a frightening thought, that in one fraction of a moment you can fall in the kind of love that takes a lifetime to get over.”— Beau Taplin

I dialed the phone that afternoon, shaking a little. I try to keep my cool when I confide in him, but this time like many others, I tremble at the dial tone. Seven years of on and off again love and friendship. That is what he was to me. We fell into a pattern of disconnect and reconnect, always keeping one another at bay.

I was in love. Seven years down the line. It wasn’t the young love we’d once shared, but an enamored love in which I was deeply more fond of the circumstances than I was the actual man standing in front of me. The phone picks up after two short rings, and there he is, seven years later the same friendly, “hello”.

You see, we’d fallen into a pattern. We needed each other in a conventional way. The way that a tree’s roots need water to survive, even if it must break concrete to reach it. I confided too much, relying on him to pick me up when everything was falling apart. We would be worlds away, and I would still ask him to call.

That afternoon I fell back in love. Forty-five minutes on the line and five years later, I slipped back into the same pattern. After speaking on a relatively serious topic, he reverted to his charming self. We childishly fought about the past and spoke with a level of excitement about who we were becoming, and when we’d see each other again. Forty-five minutes and I thought, for a second, that maybe we had a chance. I became momentarily hopeful. Maybe I would come home and we’d find ourselves in the right place, at the right time, finally looking to ignite what we once had.

But I was wrong. Our light flirtation that afternoon had caught me up. It only took me forty-five minutes to believe that we were so close to piecing our relationship together again. While I was taking root, he was breaking concrete, searching for his water elsewhere. And maybe I had dizzily fallen for us once again, and maybe, while I believed we were growing together; we’d in fact been growing further and further apart…