Love Stories That Never Took Off By Dami Adisa

M has a girlfriend. I don’t know what to think of this. The more I let it sit in my head, the more I think I should be bothered. The more I think about the conflicting signs and all the reasons against, the more I am reminded that it was never meant to be.

But I don’t want to suffer the hurt of the ‘if only’s’ and ‘should haves’ alone. I want it to be shared, a tenuous string tying and linking us for all time. Well, not all the time, but the time being.
I remember when it got serious and I tried to imagine how it would end. That it would end was certain. But never, in my wildest imaginings, did I think that this would be the means by which the most conflicting interest of my twenty-third year would be terminated.
Abruptly.
With a disappearing image, put up for a time so short that I could have missed it, yet up for long enough that I couldn’t have imagined it.
Are we still friends? I don’t know. Were we ever?
Will we still meet up and talk? Maybe. That’s all we ever did anyway.
Was I in love? Most definitely not.
But he was an option. And the thing about options is that we want them, like portals that grant us access to an exciting world, to remind eternally open in case we ever decide to take the plunge.