“I think so. I think we’re good together.”
“Oh, Jesse, that’s so wonderful. I’m really so glad to hear it.”
“I wanted to tell you . . .” he says, and then he drifts off.
“Yeah.”
“I get it now. I get what you were saying. About how falling in love with Sam didn’t mean that you forgot me. That it doesn’t change how you once felt. It doesn’t make the people you loved before any less important.
“I didn’t get it back then. I thought . . . I thought choosing him meant you didn’t love me. I thought because we didn’t work out, it meant we were a failure or a mistake. But I understand it now. Because I love her. I love her so much I can’t see straight. But it doesn’t change how I felt about you or how thankful I am to have loved you once. It’s just . . .”
“I’m the past. And she’s the present.”
“Yeah,” he says, relieved that I’ve put it into words for him, that he doesn’t have to try to find them himself. “That’s exactly it.”
I think you forsake the people you loved before, just a little bit, when you fall in love again. But it doesn’t erase anything. It doesn’t change what you had. You don’t even leave it so far behind that you can’t instantly remember, that you can’t pick it up like a book you read a long time ago and remember how it felt then.
“I guess what I’m saying is I’ve come around to your way of thinking. I am immensely thankful I was married to you once. I am so grateful for our wedding day. Just because something isn’t meant to last a lifetime doesn’t mean it wasn’t meant to be. We were meant to have been.”
I am sitting in the front seat of my car with the phone to my ear, unable to do anything but listen to him.
“You and I aren’t going to spend our lives together,” Jesse says. “But I finally understand that that doesn’t take away any of the beauty of the fact that we were right for each other once.”
“True love doesn’t always last,” I say. “It doesn’t always have to be for a lifetime.”
“Right. And that doesn’t mean it’s not true love,” Jesse says.
It was real.
And now it’s over.
And that’s OK.
“I am who I am because I loved you once,” he says.
“I am who I am because I loved you once, too,” I say.
And then we say good-bye.