Fifteen years ago, I was standing at the bar when a friend I’d only just met gave me a piece of advice.
“Right now it will feel like you can’t imagine life without him, but one day you won't be able to imagine your life with him.”
It was 2008 —just after Facebook hard-launched in Australia; the year Beijing hosted the Olympics. It was also the year that then-PM Kevin Rudd made a formal apology to Australia's Indigenous Peoples.
It was a defining year in more ways than one.
I can remember that night at the bar so clearly: the disbelief lingering in my mind; my overwhelming sense of doubt as his words came tumbling out; the way the air brewed with indecision and a deep sense of loss. And the jarring revelry around me that seemed oblivious to this god damn heartbreak.
It had been a couple of weeks since an acrimonious broke up. We were together for 8 years - longer than most people are in a job. He was my one and only until he wasn’t.
It turns out no one gives you a handbook on Heartbreak; not least High School Sweetheart Heartbreak. Young love. First love; the kind of love that convinces you, at age 24, that it trumps all things for better or worse.
—
For years it was in the mail. The end of us was like a comet in the night sky.
Ice shards started burning off as we travelled toward the sun. For years we tried hard to save it, fight for it. But this one-way ticket was simply a means to the end.
We crashed into the sun and the cosmic snowball we spent a third of our lives building shattered in a million, tiny pieces.
All that was left was a dusty trail of indistinguishable shards until we culminated in a damp, sad, fizzle.
I guess comets really don’t last forever.
—
He was right, by the way. The friend reassuring me at the bar with a Malibu pineapple and a post-breakup pep talk.
I wish I had known that the unsureness and emptiness I felt in that bar all those years ago would eventually give way to resolution and, quite frankly, relief.
That night I was in search for a shoulder to cry on. But I actually found something in this universe so much greater than that.
I met my future husband in the same bar two months later. Today, we’re 13 years married.
A noble comet might not last forever, but it exists to be part of the bigger picture.
We just don’t realise it at the time.
I don’t believe in luck but I believe things happen for a reason. Life gives us what we need, not always what we want. And what is meant for you always arrives on time.
I drive past this bar every now and then and I think back to that night. Both nights, actually.
Call it fate, destiny or a comforting reminder that all endings are also beginnings. And, like a comet, to stay the course even if it’s so dark that you can’t find your way through.
Perhaps there’s some truth to what a wise old person once said: that when the stars align, we find our soulmates in the same place we go to find our souls.
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