The Hidden Dance

Four years.

Five years.

Surely, it will happen soon.

Six years.

Seven years.

You just haven’t met the right one yet. It’s fine - good things come to those who wait.

Eight years.

Nine years.

Shit, you’re broken. Maybe he was the one and you fucked it up - now you're being punished for turning your back on love. Or maybe you’re just not capable of love anymore. Perhaps you’re missing some intrinsic piece of your soul that makes people... human.

After all, you had once been in love. Very much in love. When people hear 16 year olds say they’re in love, they laugh. Hell, even you laugh, despite knowing it’s possible - you lived it. But you also know how rare it is. To meet someone in your mid-teens and finally find home after searching for your forever and a day. To have this wonderful human being with whom you can be yourself and to whom you allow all your secrets and darkest thoughts to come tumbling out. And then finally to being too immature to understand how rare this is. To have received such a magnificent gift at such a young age that you then assume that this is commonplace, and not something to be treasured. To then spend year after year merely going through the motions, finding people who are fine, you suppose, but feeling your heart ice over bit by bit. Until suddenly you’re heading toward your late 20s, and you’re wholeheartedly convinced love isn’t on the cards for you.

And then 10 years hits. A fucking decade. That’s it. It’s done. Over. Broken. Irreparable. You had your one love. You blew it. Deal with it.

Then one night, you message a boy. One you’d met years beforehand at a party just mere hours after being dumped. You’d instantly hit it off, and messaged sporadically through the years; a pull that never quite eventuated to anything. But this time, something sticks - you agree to catch up for a drink. Suddenly, you’re feeling things you’ve not felt in years. It’s not quite the same as a decade ago. You’re older now. Life has done things to you. You know how the world works. You’re less sure about yourself. But you’re sure about this. That you want to keep feeling these things. Your heart is beating again. The ice is warming. Melting. Like the first sunny day after a long, bitter winter. But the problem is that you can love someone all you want - if that person doesn’t love themselves, it’s never going to go anywhere.

In the end, there are tears. Fuck. So many. Finally you fell in love again, only for you both to realise you were completely incompatible. Yet, as time drips on, the tears become relief. You’re not broken. But if it took ten years to find the second person you could love, how long would it take to find the third.

One year.

Two years.

Three years.

Four years.

Five years - that’s how long. Once again, a man you had met years beforehand. Who had piqued your interest enough that he was somehow hidden away in the middle of your mind, popping into your thoughts at strange and random times. Never enough for you to enquire after him to a mutual friend, but perhaps just lingering there as though the universe wanted you to know he played a bigger part in your future than you’d cared to realise.

Yes, one afternoon, his name slips from your lips - an unconscious wish - and the next evening, you walk into your friend’s kitchen, slightly tipsy, and there he is. There. He. Is. There he always has been.

Because, although it had been 15 long years since the first time you’d fallen in love - all of that waiting, all of those years, those fears, those heartaches - led you right here. And suddenly you realise those years your heart was frozen weren't an ailment - it was the universe protecting your heart, putting it on ice to heal it, to preserve it so that it could thaw out at exactly the right moment. So that by the time you met him, it would be in full bloom, ready to love the right person this time. The one who made every apparent misstep in your life seem like an impromptu dance that in reality was perfectly choreographed to his own.

And yes, dear reader - I married him.