world of two
when a relationship ends, an entire world disappears
There were words we used, nonsense words born of inside jokes, words that would make sense to no one else. There were certain phrases we used with each other to elicit laughter, or to convey an emotion, phrases that would seem silly were we to say them in front of other people. We had a vocabulary all our own and when we spoke in our shared language to each other, it felt like intimacy. The more years we spent together, the more the vocabulary grew, the more this language became what we always spoke when alone.
There were other things besides words; there were the routines we made around each other’s needs, the way our days were a synchronized event, how we sometimes would spend a whole night sitting in comfortable silence, looking up from whatever we were reading to occasionally smile, how we agreed that one of us would not go to bed without the other.
Love is like that; you make a world of two, a world in which only you know the language and the routine. It’s a bubble of sorts. No one enters that sacred place where you separate your world from the outside. You step outside it, but no one comes in. It’s a profound intimacy, this world.
It dawned on me yesterday that there’s a reason I’ve been having a hard time letting go of my previous coupled life, why after a year and half I still feel lost and untethered. It’s not just that my world was shattered; it’s that the world we had built between us was suddenly gone. All those words and phrases, all those routines, all that synchronicity just disappeared in the space of a day. We had spent fourteen years building that world, shaping it, learning to live in it, cultivating it. And then, gone.
The language we created became useless. No one else would know those jokes, those little quips, the words we used just between us. The bubble was broken, real life filtered in and rendered our intimate world extinct. We had lived in world of two for fourteen years and I was suddenly thrust into a place where the escapism of that world was no longer available to me, where the love that endured in those years was now unavailable to comfort and shield me. It’s no wonder I feel lost. I am without the home I had so carefully curated for myself, a whole world gone overnight.
Having come to this realization, knowing what it is that keeps me feeling like an astronaut floating in space, perhaps I can now work my way into a new world, one where I learn to navigate life alone. There’s no bubble anymore, there’s no feeling of protection, there’s just a lost language and a barren world. Losing that world is devastating, but it doesn’t have to devastate me as a whole. I just have to step out into the real world on my own, step out of my broken bubble, leave those intimate words and phrases behind.
It’s all easier said than done, of course. Sixteen months after the annihilation of our universe, I’m still sort of reeling at the suddenness with which it disappeared. But now I can pinpoint where that untethered feeling is coming from. Now I can say goodbye to that part of my life, that world I thought would never end. I am here, in your world, looking to move forward.
I will always remember the world we lived in, but it’s all a postcard in my mind now, just a reminder of a place I visited that no longer exists. I’m glad I have those memories, I’m glad to have little artifacts from my time there. But it is time to leave the wreckage behind.