Every once in awhile, at some randomly chosen time in the years, months, and moments since you’ve moved on, your heart groans and turns in your chest for that ‘should-have-been’ boy. Like a hibernated bear, it rolls over and stretches a bit, smacks its chops in a lazy yawn, and repositions itself a little more comfortably in its ribcage cave. There really is no grand spring awakening of the … is there a word to ever describe it? The emotions? The yearning? The tears and shreds of your insides as you weep to the sky a hundred whys? The thunderous storm of joy that crashes over you when they smile or say just the right thing?

Well, whatever it was, or is for that little stretch of nostalgia, it never really rests. There will forever be the bit you missed that bled into the fractures of your bones before you scrubbed and ravaged clean your wounds. A love like that, a connection of soul to soul, whether they ever reciprocated or not, never really ends. It just… fades…

Fades to a ever-so-slight pastel memory, one that if you squint just tight enough and peek through your interlaced lashed, you can pick up on. For the lucky ones, a bold and vibrant new something or other comes along and splashes your convincing clean slate with everything worth losing for. A finally happens, a forever begins, a Mr. Right shows up. For others, maybe not. Let us hope, regardless, that comfort lies in the inevitable.

I wonder, in my own moment, here, now, when I’m caught off guard with no strong face or soldiered gates, in the minutes between a long day and anticipated slumber, what would have happened, what might have been, if that bear of a love had wandered into a welcomed terrain. If the hibernation was, is, indeed seasonal sleep, and we never really move on. How do we know? Does it lie in the hopeful when new chance is upon us? Or is the love still silently sleeping, only dreaming of the might have been, never to see an April of second chances.

I don’t know.

But I’m remembering how it felt to love you once, and how easily in this randomly chosen moment to do so again, how hard it is to comfort my heart back to sleep, and yet how gently it goes.

I’m ready for something new. It won’t be you, so who?