The One Who Walked Away Was Not Your End Game

For the ones that love and lose and don’t want to play anymore.

Have you ever met that person who feels like the one? We meet them and think, this is it. This is my forever. End game. But something changes, and one day, they walk away. But the game’s not over. We’re still playing — even when we don’t want to be.

It’s a harsh reality but one necessary to accept. A person who walks away from us wasn’t our end game. Second-chance romances may disagree, but real life is hardly a romance novel. All we’ve got is reality, and if we live outside of it, if we refuse to believe what is as clear as day to everyone else, we’ll stay in a state of suspended animation — living in our heads, in the past, anywhere but in our lives as they’re happening. We block love from entering because we’re sure we had it, we’re not sure how we lost it, and we can’t ever imagine experiencing that again with someone else.

But the game’s not over. For a while, I took a pause. I thought it would never end. I had to sit out and feel all my feelings. Then, I decided I would wait for the love to pass. Surely, it would go away if I just ignored it, right? Only that’s not how love works.

Eventually, I found myself on a date. The first time, I knew it was too soon, and I hit Pause again. But the second time I found myself on a date, I connected with someone as hurt and broken as I was. We weren’t each other’s End Game, but we were another heartbeat in the dark while we pulled our lives back together. We would go our separate ways, but I knew the game wasn’t over. Some days, it feels like it never stops.

What makes this hard for people like me is that I’m surrounded by people who have found their person. They don’t remember what it’s like to have thought they found them only to be sent right back to the start to begin again. They don’t understand how my heart got hung up so long on someone who would leave, and it’s even harder for them to fathom why I don’t move on as easily as everyone else seems to do.

But my heart doesn’t care about the weeks, months, or years since it loved and felt loved. It only longs for that connection again — longs for it and fears it in equal measure. My mind knows that someone who left was not my end game, but my heart gets stuck in that loop of hope and fear. Hope that I will love again, fear that I’ll love again, and fear that I never will.

But facing reality is how we grow. It’s how we absorb the lessons and change the game. At first, I thought the reality was that I am hard to love. It’s been said before. But I came to realize that this was not my truth or my lesson.

Then, I thought the lesson was that the timing was just off. I told myself a star-crossed lovers’ story until even I could admit that I was bending and stretching the truth to form a pretty story. Second-chance romances may happen, but I had to accept I’m more likely to write one than to live one. Star-crossed lovers — that wasn’t my truth or my lesson.

I couldn’t even assign fault to his character or make him out to be the villain. My friends were quick to assign blame, but I couldn’t find the truth in it. There is no fault when it comes to feelings. I loved it, and he didn’t. That was the truth — and my lesson. But there was another just behind it: I wasn’t out of the game then, and I’m not now. One failed relationship isn’t a predictor that no other will work out. It only means the wrong one was never going to be right, no matter how much we might have wished it would be.

I’m still playing even when I find the game tedious and lackluster. I keep an open heart even though it flinches away from hope and fear on days when I’m reminded of the inherent risk of loving anyone in this world. I’m not out, not even when I thought I had found me forever and found, instead, that I was wrong. I keep going because I know that my story doesn’t end when someone else walks out of it. I have this one life to live, and I plan to live it well and to love courageously.

That’s my truth and my lesson — and perhaps it’s not only mine. The one who walked away was not our end game. They were only a part of the story. Whether that part was beautiful, meaningful, or simply painful, it matters. But it’s not all that does. So, we take our hurting hearts and heal, and one day, on a day that feels just as ordinary as any other but isn’t, we’ll meet someone with a heart that beats in time to our own. It could be forever or just another lesson, but by then, we’re strong enough to want to find out.