To the right person I met at the wrong time,

You were everything to me, and nothing to me, and everything in between, all at once.

I never understood it when people said that you can be something and nothing simultaneously until you. It was a cycle of high hopes, let downs and false comfort. Every time my hopes started to soar, I'd be faced with the truth once again, and crash back down, only for the process to immediately start over again.

I never got a break. We never got a break, and I think that is owed partially to your inability to talk, and partially to my inability to just listen. Confrontation and conversations about feelings weren't our strong suit, but I guess that makes sense, because it wasn't our time, no matter how much I tried to convince myself that we were supposed to work out.

And let me tell you, I tried. I never stopped trying, and part of me still hasn't stopped trying, to believe that we are supposed to work out. The thing is, though, the other part of me understands that we weren't. If we were, we wouldn't have met at the wrong time.

Looking at it in retrospect, I've come to understand it like this: if things are meant to fall into place, they will, in time. If things are meant to fall into place, they will fall into place. If things aren't meant to fall into place, we will continue along our separate paths, and both of us will eventually find the person with whom we are meant to stay. Either way, we come out on the other side happy, even if that happiness isn't something we find together.

This perspective is one that took me so long to understand, and even longer to accept. Now, though, I can't imagine looking at things any other way.

How can I force something into existence if it just isn't there? I can't.

The fact of the matter is that I could drive myself crazy flushing out each and every hypothetical situation in my head. What if I'd said the things I held back on, and what if I'd said those things in the right moments? What if I'd mastered my timing rather than just sitting back and letting it play out? What if I'd just been up front? What if you had just been up front?

I could go on and on, conjuring up questions I don't have answers to and never will have answers to. I've tried to find those answers, whether it be through self-reflection or through desperate attempts to pull those answers out of you (none of which were successful). I could go on and on badgering both you and myself about why we went wrong or why we didn't try hard enough to fix things when they started to break.

I could go on and on, but I won't, and that's because there is only one single piece which fits into the missing part of the puzzle. There is one single answer which solves every question, every problem, every misunderstanding, and missed opportunity, and that answer is this: it wasn't our time.

I am a strong believer that people don't meet by accident, and every person who comes into your life is there for a reason. I don't think the universe brings people together for the sole purpose of tearing them away from each other again. That being said, I think we met for a reason. As of now, I understand that reason as one of self-growth, realization, and respect. I allowed myself to be strung along for months, all while knowing it wasn't our time, just for the sake of entertaining feelings I knew I couldn't pursue. I allowed myself to fall over and over again, knowing I would hit the ground every single time. I allowed myself to go through so much hurt just because I felt for you. And that is precisely the reason why the universe brought you into my life.

I needed that in order to see where my weaknesses were. I needed to come to understand my flaws and my fears in order to find the freedom and space to grow. I needed to lose you in order to find myself.

And that is exactly how it happened. You disappeared from my life slowly, and then all at once, just the way you came into it, and once the rug had been pulled out from under my feet, I was on my own and it was up to me to learn how to stand up straight again. And I did.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if we'd met later on, in a situation where we could pursue this concept of "us" that I spent so long slaving over in my mind.

Would we pursue "us", if given the chance? Even where we stand now, would we pursue "us" if the universe were to decide to bring us back together? I would say that I'd like to think so, but I don't know if I would like to think so, because thinking so would probably make the fact that we aren't "us" even harder. Instead, I'll just take it for what it is, or at least what I believe it to be as I write this: nothing.

So, to the right person met at the wrong time,

It turns out you weren't the right person after all, because the right person won't be met at the wrong time.