"That's not a fling. That's your soul mate."

"I've been seeing someone new lately."


This is where it starts.

Rational thought takes the wheel again. You left on a plane three months ago and built up these irrational fantasies in your head of an ideal world where romance and fairy tale endings occur. A seven-hour plane ride, an ocean divide, a five-hour time difference, a hasty "I can't do this" at the airport didn't seem to shake the hope from your mind.

But you know why you held onto hope - a few simple words: "who knows how we'll be in 3 months?". You held onto the what ifs. At the airport, you had pulled out the letter that had been hastily handed to you, and you just read it in silence, smiling at the comical parts, and tearing up at the sentimental parts. So you waited - holding onto the 0.00001% hope that it would work out, that he would be waiting too.

Whenever I think about this story, I always call it my summer fling. But they say that a relationship is friendship set on fire - and when I throw in the detail of our fourteen-year friendship, I always get the same response - "That's not a fling. That's your soul mate."

But that was far from the truth; I just always naively hoped it was reality.

While I was busy mapping out y=x, starting from day 1, he was just trying to navigate y=sin(x).

During that summer, we were hopeless romantics with grand delusions of a "great love", an "irreplaceable connection", and yearning for a "deeper relationship". These things allowed us to wear those rose-coloured glasses and dress up what shaky foundation we had blindly built to be much more than it actually was - we were just two kids experimenting with shiny new toys.

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but I'd like to think this only occurs if the heart was actually fond in the first place. So I've taken off the rose-coloured glasses for now and put them aside.

It's such a waste, but when you look into those same eyes and you can't see what you've always seen for the past fourteen years, it ends with, "I don't think that we can be friends."