Let the Post-It note do the talking

Post-It Notes. Those are what we used to communicate as we were sitting across the table from one another at a restaurant during dinner.

"Do you believe in long distance relationships? Can we do this?" he had asked me. He was going home for the summer break and was considering doing an exchange the following semester in another country. That would be around eight months. He had asked me this before, last summer, and we both had been alright with it. We didn't want to ruin the perfectly good evening by the possibility of saying something horrible out loud, so we passed post-it notes to each other and each picked up a pen, writing down our decision.

I remember writing down that "it is going to be hard, but I believe that we can do it." I passed this over to him and he cringed, knowing that his answer was going to upset me. I opened up his note and there they were; the words "NO TO LDR', in capital letters, with the word NO underlined not just once, but three times for extra emphasis on the NO.

"Oh," I responded.

"Sorry," he replied.

"No, that's fine. That's how you feel," I answered.

"So what happens now? I feel like I just put an expiry date on our relationship," he joked.

I remember asking him if he would regret walking away from this, and he said yes.

But that's all I can remember now.