It was fairly late as we headed back to Ottawa on that particular Saturday night. We had covered 2,200 kilometers in five days and all the while, the last two hundred felt like they were going on forever. We were driving past Kingston as I saw the lights of the Division Street exit up ahead. I felt like I’d taken that ramp a thousand times throughout my life and most often, with tears streaming down my face and more emotions than I knew what to do with. In the summer of 2001, I was supposed to move to Kingston…until the ravages of time and a broken heart put me on a detour. Though now – looking back – I am more and more convinced that moving there in the first place would have been the detour.

Two years prior to this decision, I had just fallen in love. It was the “all-encompassing, larger than life” sort of love. The kind of love that captures you in its vortex and never lets go. The kind of love that shakes you and binds you all at the same time. It had the desperate passion and intensity that only first loves can have. We went to rock concerts and field parties. We drank on patios and in front of fireplaces. We slept all day and stayed out all night. We did every thing wrong because it seemed so right.  A year a half later, he got offered a job in Kingston. A perfect job. The job of a lifetime. And so – with my blessing – off he went. But not without first asking me to join him. “Come with me”, he said… “it will be great”. With a look that swallowed me whole, I agreed. In four months, I would be graduating from University and from there, I would start looking for a new job in our new city…so that I could start living our new life.

In the meantime, we spent every weekend traveling the 200kms back and forth to see each other. I would take the Division Street exit and head towards the water where he lived. The more I did this though, the more we started to fight…the more easily the tears seemed to fall…the harder it seemed to leave each time. Whenever I turned off the Division Street exit and on to the 401…I felt like I was going home…to the place where I was supposed to be. The arguments were mostly with myself as I battled it out with the demons in my head; Here we were, two years later, and he was chasing after his future while I was waiting for mine…hoping that it would find me in this little house along the St. Lawrence River or tucked away in some cute shop along Princess Street. Even though we never said anything…we both felt it…we felt the sense of being caged that came from trying to make our futures one.

In early June of that year we decided to take a break from the relationship that was obviously blurring our vision. A month later, he came to Ottawa to visit me for my birthday. We spent the day in a blissful bubble that was all our own, then later that night, he got in his car and headed back to his future. As he pulled away, he slowed down, looked back at me and whispered “I love you” through the driver seat window. I sat down on the curb with my head in my hands and as I watched him drive away…I knew I would never see him again. It was over…we were over. When I finally picked myself up off the sidewalk, I went back into my apartment, curled up in my bed under the covers and stayed there for almost four months.

For years after that I could barely even drive by Kingston without having to catch my breath. The pain, the agony, the ecstasy of it all was too much for me to bear. My first broken heart happened on that stretch of road and there were times when I thought that I would never feel whole again. At the age of 21, I certainly lacked foresight…but I never imagined having to choose between life and love…between a future that was mine or a future that was ours. Though perhaps that was the problem; that the future never would have been ours. My future, while still uncertain, was in the city that I loved and his future was somewhere yet to be determined. One of us would have been unhappy and he just happen to be the one brave enough to admit. One of us had to be.

As the lights of Kingston started to fade in our rear view mirror, I felt comforted by knowing how much time heals all wounds. How much the universe knows better than we do. How spending two years intoxicated by my first love wasn’t a mistake…but giving up my dreams to follow his would have been. For all of the times that I cried and ached over a pain that I thought would never go away…here I was; with my future driving our car and my future sleeping in the back seat…my future a mere two hours away in the city that I love and the reason that we had left it for a week in the first place. The future that I was always meant to have was driving away from the past that taught me the biggest lesson of my life…

Know thyself…trust thyself…believe in thyself…

Photo credit: Last Forty Percent Photography