Thunderstorms rarely appear without warning. Quite often you feel it in the air before they hit. There’s a slight change in the atmosphere, the clouds morph from fluffy white to voluminous and grey, then the downpour ensues. Three and a half weeks ago, the storm hit. And I’m soaked. All 50 shades of the grey clouds were looming and yet somehow, I failed to properly prepare myself.

I said before that I had been struggling with the Vegan. I’m not the type to suffer in silence, believe me. I had expressed my concerns during our 10-month endeavours but since the problems present were one-sided, so too were the attempts to fix them.

I guess it comes down to individual priorities. At times, we’ve all told ourselves and others that we’re too busy to visit grandma/take up a new hobby/attend a friend’s event/etc etc but more often than not, the reality is that we’re just not willing to check our priorities and momentarily move something up the list for the pleasure and/or need of someone else. Because when it mattered most to him, he’d find a way to fit in all the things that he wanted to do. This, above all, was my grievance.

I’m a firm believer that relationships should be an extension of a friendship. At the end of the day, when you’re both old folks with various knee/hip/teeth replacements between the two of you and by God’s good grace you’re both sound of mind, the biggest asset you’ll have is your friendship. The ability to freely and endlessly talk about the main and the mundane topics. There are a plethora of physical ailments that life can throw at you when approaching your twilight years, sex can only do so much for you along the way but a connection of the minds is much more binding. This isn’t to say that our relationship was strictly physical, I made a huge point about my disinterest in such engagements right at the outset. However, with the time restrictions we faced, it had become much more of a prominent factor than I might had ordinarily allowed.

I was looking to build something with someone, so my focus was on getting the foundations right. He, from what I could tell, was happy to just see what would emerge, with no specific expectations of what might actualise before him. So when I would talk about needing to do more activities to create memories together, he couldn’t quite see my point. He didn’t agree with the notion of being in external settings just to provoke new conversations. And for the nights when we were at home, we failed to embark on the meaningful talks that unveiled anything further than surface knowledge of each other.

All in all, our relationship goals weren’t aligned, nor were our approaches. Omitting the finite details of what brought on the storm, all I will say is that it happened and ultimately, I got what I’d inadvertently wished for. I wasn’t entirely happy, I wasn’t wholly convinced that we could work through our differences, and at the same time we never fully conveyed what our future expectations were for ourselves. Having carried this feeling with me for 10-months, I should be relieved to have a resolution to my dilemma. I’m not. It’s just made it worse.

At the moment, we’re on talking terms, marginally. I read once that the most realistic way to have a body like Kate Moss* after you’ve had a baby, is to have a body like Kate Moss before you had a baby. The thinking behind this I suppose is that it’s much easier to return to your initial condition after your body and mind has endured an alternate state. It’s a little unrealistic (although not impossible) to expect yourself to ‘return’ to a condition that you hadn’t attained in the first place. To relate this to my situation, considering we didn’t have much of a solid friendship before we got involved romantically, I’m not going to count on us having one afterwards and at this point, can’t really expect more than us to just be marginally talking.

Disappointed as I’ve been over the last few weeks, in my heart of hearts, I know this was the natural course for the relationship. If I’d been braver, we may even have reached here sooner and storm free. Trying to deviate from what was already written shows the true optimist in me, which some might say also makes me too forgiving, or just outright foolish. Nonetheless, the storm has come and gone, so too has the Vegan, and I miss him. Time to go dry off I guess.

*Kate Moss is a direct reference from the article, feel free to insert whoever you find most inspiring here