The Men We Become
Every Version Was Real.
Morning
There are women who have met three different versions of me.
The man who wanted to sleep with them.
The man who wanted to spend the rest of his life with them.
And the man who couldn’t tell you the difference anymore.
People have called me a flirt my entire life.
I never really understood why.
I was raised by women, my sisters, my mom who ran the house, my aunt who could tell the future.
The women in my life taught me people.
My dad was a poet, a man who suffered more than most should have to.
He taught me words.
When I met her what I realized is everything before her felt childish.
The jokes.
The flirting.
The late nights.
The chasing.
I stopped talking to other women because I couldn’t imagine wanting to be with anyone else.
We looked at condos.
We imagined kids who didn’t exist yet.
Gave them names.
I bought a ring.
Then she left.
Depression is a fight you can’t afford to lose.
People assume heartbreak looks dramatic.
Mine looked ordinary.
Dating apps.
First and second dates.
New apartments.
Different perfume.
Different laughs.
I’ve sat across from women who are kind, intelligent, funny, beautiful.
The ones who anyone would be lucky to know.
Some of them wanted me.
Some of them didn’t.
Some became friends.
Some became memories.
I remember one girl knew more about airplanes than anyone I’ve ever met.
We had a picnic, ate together, climbed trees, talked about the wildest things we’ve ever done. She used a packet of mayo for a [REDACTED].
I told her Id write about it.
She taught me things I’ll probably remember for the rest of my life.
The spark just wasn’t there.
Not because there was anything wrong, sometimes there’s just no chemistry.
There was another girl.
We spoke for hours about faith, philosophy, fear, and the lives we’d survived before meeting each other.
She’d talk about how I was going to get her pregnant and I’d tell her I don’t see a problem with that.
Every time we got close, she’d disappear.
Every time she came back, I found myself hoping she’d be able to stay.
Some people don’t fear love.
They fear what happens after.
Then there was the girl who had just lost someone she thought she’d spend forever with.
So had I.
We recognized it in each other immediately.
Our first conversations weren’t flirtatious.
They were confessions.
Two strangers handing each other pieces of our hearts and somehow trusting neither would squeeze.
One night, in the middle of everything, she called me by her ex’s name.
She froze.
“I’m so sorry.”
I laughed.
“It’s okay.”
“I’ve been calling you my ex’s name this whole time.”
Right name. Wrong girl.
We stared at each other, not knowing if we should laugh or cry.
You know grief doesn’t just haunt your memories, it also borrows other people’s faces.
After she left, I slept with women I knew I wasn’t going to love.
Not because I wanted to hurt them, or because I was proud of it.
Because I kept hoping that eventually I’d wake up, and not turn over to say good morning to a ghost.
I still do.
I feel like I grew up and people talked about body counts like it was a scoreboard.
While mine always felt like a calendar.
I can tell you exactly where I was in my life, and why I reached for that person.
Sometimes it was loneliness.
Sometimes it was curiosity.
Sometimes hope.
Sometimes numbness.
Sometimes love.
And what’s strange is I don’t think I’ve become colder.
If anything I’ve become softer.
More careful.
More honest.
I’ve learned to tell people when I don’t see a future instead of pretending I do.
I’ve learned attraction isn’t the same thing as peace.
I’ve learned that some of the women I’ve admired the most were the ones I never kissed.
And I’ve learned that grief can disguise itself as desire.
I don’t see people split into bad or good.
I just see people trying to survive their own trauma.
Some of them build homes.
Some of them build walls.
Some build bars hoping they’ll stay open long enough to forget.
And somewhere during building, I became another man.
Not a better one.
Not a worse one.
Just someone still trying to figure out which version of himself deserves to come home.
Aw this was heart wrenching, in a good way though!
Great writing dude! You inspire me to try to write better myself