The One That Got Away

I gave myself a gap year following the graduation of my bachelor’s. I had a boyfriend at the time but before I met him, there was someone else. The kind who arrives once, at the wrong time, and never quite leaves.

He was a captain, forced to spend half the year at sea, drifting between continents.

The first night we met we slept on a boat watching the stars as he explained the constellations. I hadn’t laughed that freely with someone without worrying if I sounded too much. It was as if I was allowed to ‘be’ for the first time in my life.

A few days later, I was headed to a festival on a mountain by the coast. I asked him to come with me, yet he had to take care of his mother.

I went to the festival with my cousin and met my boyfriend at the time.

The first few months of my relationship were exciting just like every other first in life. He loved me exactly the way I wanted to be loved, until it slowly turned into an obsession. He grew jealous of anyone I loved beyond him, insisting my love was insufficient unless it conformed to his terms.

There is no universal language of love. I did still love him. Just not in the way I used to.

The way we love shifts with the versions of ourselves we inhabit. What I once thought was enough, no longer was in time.

September 1st marked our first-year anniversary, simultaneously marking the invisible knot around my throat tightening further.

I started leaving myself notes on my phone whenever I felt trapped, so I wouldn’t talk myself out of breaking up with him, since gaslighting my judgment was my second nature.

August 13, 2021

You want out of this. The longer you spent with him, the more trapped you felt by what he said and how he acted. Nothing in you wants to meet him halfway.

Caught in the middle of an internal war, an existential crisis hit like a rupture. I didn’t want him or his smile to disappear. I could not imagine waking up to a day where I didn’t receive his message that said,

“Good morning love.”

He was my first boyfriend, an anchor to my identity.

Deep down, I knew I didn’t want to be that person anymore yet my nervous system chose the familiar hell that it knew, keeping me imprisoned in a relationship that I long outgrew.

One day, I received a message from the captain, telling me he was back in town. I lied and told him I had finals coming up. I knew what seeing him would mean, so I kept dodging him until my relationship no longer left me room to breathe.

We met at a concert. I still remember each second of that day with a longing I wish I never experienced.

“I kept imagining this moment for the past six months,” the captain said.

My logic dissolved under the warmth that spread around my body, fusing my cheeks with the most lively red I’ve ever seen. My heart skipped more than a few beats as my palms started to sweat, and my smile vanished as our lips met. When he asked me to be his girlfriend, I became the happiest and the saddest person in the world.

I told him I already had a boyfriend.
He never looked at me the same.

I was ready to break up with my boyfriend when I asked the captain to meet me the next day. I needed to tell him. To ask him if he was in this with me.

When I was finally ready to risk everything, he was no longer there to meet me.

I never got to tell him I loved him.

By the time I chose, timing had shifted. So had he.

I went to the beach that day, crying to the sea, half-believing he could appear out of nothing, the way he had the first time.

Humans struggle with incomplete stories.

For the avoidant, longing from afar feels less threatening than being fully seen. Distance feels safer than intimacy.

Fellow anxious attachment survivors especially romanticise lost love.

When he left before the relationship fully matured, conflict never fully developed either. My brain filled in the blanks with fantasy, preserving him in his peak form.

His absence protected him from reality.

No long-term friction.
No boredom.
No decay.

The what-ifs followed me into every new connection. The fantasy of what could’ve been was suffocating me in the reality I was living.

If there’s anything worse than heartbreak, it is experiencing it while you are in a relationship with someone else.

I cheated on my boyfriend later that summer.
I couldn’t look at him without hating myself.

The only greater regret than my unfaithfulness toward him was my unfaithfulness to myself. The one that cost me the only person I thought could be “the one.”

Five years later, I still ask myself the same question.

What if I hadn’t stayed in a relationship longer than I should have?

It wasn’t just the captain that I pondered. It was the version of me who didn’t choose herself when she could have.

He was a doorway that I lacked the courage to step through.

I knew I wasn’t happy before the captain appeared on my stage, yet I needed notes on my phone, the presence of someone else to convince me of what my body already knew.

Doubting myself had always been easier than leaving, even with the cost of dimming.

I was not grieving the captain.
I was grieving the decision I couldn’t make.
The woman I kept myself from becoming.