I must be in a publishing mood tonight. I found this ending to a story in my files. The beginning is finished, the middle needs to be written but I wrote the end because I know how this story is going to end. When I read this I cried and thought of my friend B from Dallas. Although this story is completely fictional, I imagine us having this kind of ending if we ever got into a relationship.

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I looked at him. I was confused, terribly confused. I knew he was right and that breaking up was the right thing to do but I was disappointed somehow. How can you spend your whole life wanting something and then when you finally get it, you give it up because it doesn’t make any sense to want it when you finally get it. I felt a lump in my throat that I knew was a silent scream that I felt too embarrassed to make. I was having a hard time thinking because when I get upset I can’t think straight and I desperately needed to think straight now. I kept searching my feelings like a desperate man in search of water. I felt all the frustration of the last two years creating anger in my heart and at the same time I felt teary eyed. This can’t be happening to me I thought, this can’t be happening. I looked over at him, sitting there calmly waiting for me to compose myself. He looked sad I thought, there was none of that exciting Texas spirit I always saw in his eyes, just the look of a man who has just made a gut wrenching decision and was now trying to live with the consequences.

I looked out the window staring at the flat dry landscape before me. Our whole relationship played through my head like a video on fast forward. I knew we had been happy for a time, very happy but I also knew that the happiness had been brief and short lived and the rest of the time we were together, we waged a constant but silent battle of wills. Was marriage worth this battle? His explanation kept playing in my head like a bad song that you can’t get out of your head and deep deep down in the recesses of my heart, I knew he was right and part of me kept trying to whisper that this was all for the best, but I couldn’t just accept it, not yet, not just yet.

I felt him pick up my left hand on the table and squeeze it. I wanted to wrench my hand away and slap him but I couldn’t. I knew he was trying to comfort me, to help me, and I felt a pang of guilt that my first instinct was to reject him. This is what I hate, I was losing a good friend, a best friend, who knew me sometimes better than I did. I knew we would always be friends, friends till the end of our lives, but I also knew that we would both avoid the intimacy that we had developed over these last two years so as not to open old wounds. Then I realized, it wasn’t so much breaking up that hurt, it was losing the attention of this wonderful man, this urban cowboy that I had grown to love very much, this connection to a part of my soul that this man had opened up.

I finally turned my head and looked down at his hand covering mine; even our hands together looked mismatched somehow although there were on top of each other. I let my eyes wonder up his sleeve, over his shoulder, over his face and finally straight into his eyes. Kind eyes, I thought to myself. There was always kindness in those eyes despite the pain and sadness I was seeing there now. I found myself drowning in those hazel green eyes of his and feeling like I had somehow secretly landed into his soul. There was comfort there as well sadness, a sense of failure, and pain, lots and lots of pain. My heart went out to him and I knew that I could now live with our breakup.

I turned my hand over and squeezed his hand back and smiled.
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Tear jerker of an ending, I know. I think alot of relationships end like this ... in silence ... with a single touch. Sometimes there are no words to express pain, sadness and longing. Sometimes there's just silence and the touching of skin and then silence again.