525,600 minutes

One year ago today at approximately this time, I was detaching K's keys from my keyring and walking out the door of his apartment. I'd walked in still calling myself his girlfriend. When I walked out, I wasn't anymore.

In the days leading up to that moment--after I'd made the decision, but before I'd told him about it--I'd wondered if I had ever really loved him. I felt so distant from any time in our relationship in which I'd been happy, it was easy to think that those times had never existed. We'd stopped overlapping. I was happier when I was spending time without him than I was when we were together. It was over.

I walked out the door and felt part of myself evaporate as I went. I'd lived in his apartment longer than I'd lived in any of my own during our time together--over five years, I'd lived in four different places. I knew his neighbors better than I knew any of my own. I walked out and knew I wouldn't be back. Not in the same way. Not as someone who lived there.

I walked down the street and away from his building, past the nightclub and the steady, thrumming bass that had reliably kept me awake on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights for the past five years; past the local coffee shop that sold bad drinks and attitude but didn't take credit cards; past the bar where a month or so later we'd meet for a first awkward post-breakup beer. I was leaving him behind, shedding our past.

As I walked away I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I loved him. I knew that I loved him and that it was over. 

A year later, I have no desire to call and tell him I'm thinking of him. I still see things that make me think of him almost every day, but I don't immediately pick up my phone to tell him when I do. When I see him--I still don't know how to act, because he's still so much the person that belonged so much to me--but when I see him, there's the distance of what our lives have become in diverging, and we flounder as we try to negotiate it. So I try not to see him.

Someone once told me about a girl that he loved with his whole head--the problem was his heart, which stubbornly refused to come along for the ride. I think with K and I, the problem was just the opposite. My heart was his in spite of my head--but try as it might, my heart could never make my head settle down.

I still love K. I will love him always. I miss the love we shared. But 525,600 minutes later--I still have no regrets.