No Going Back

It ended there. It was over and all we could do was walk away. I thought about turning back to see if she would turn too, but... well, I didn't want to look back, not any more.

There had been weeks of looking back. Months of searching for that point when we stopped creating the possibility of a future together and began to look away from each other. Each searching the horizon on our evening walks along the cliff path.

There had been a time, and it seemed so long ago now, when we would only ever look at each other on those walks. Then, when we did look at other things, like the porpoises in the bay, it was because one of us had shown them to the other. Almost as if we could only see the world beyond ourselves through the eyes of the other.

Now, though, we did not even turn to see each other leave. She went off, back to that cottage by the sea. I took the train to some new world. Something not bound by the sea and its horizons, but something seeming smaller than that constrained land where we had found something almost limitless, at least for a while.

I thought that maybe – one day – she would call and I would go back to find everything back to how it used to be. Deep down, though, I knew that we could never go back to how it used to be. Even when we return to places that once contained all we could ever want, on returning we find them small, constrained and limited. Far less than we remember, often with hardly any trace of why we once thought them so important.

So, when that call did come, I didn't go back.