Notes: Perfect Memory belongs to Remy Zero.
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So look back on the treasured days
We were young in a world that was so tired...
The first time she had walked out of his life, he had known in some unseen and unacknowledged corner of his mind that she would return. The second time she did it, he was sure that she was gone forever.
He tried to console himself with the idea that this was just who she was. It had been her transient nature that had brought her to his doorstep in the first place, and the same quality had been what had forced her to pack up and leave again.
But in the end, he was left with the undeniable truth that he just hadn�t been enough for her.
He had been content in his life before she had come, and he had begun to believe that she could be happy there too. He had fooled himself into thinking that he would be able to fill the hole that California had left in her, and then he had failed utterly. Her discontent was never apparent, not until that last night, and as she spoke those bitter words, venting her frustration and need, he found himself wondering how he had never noticed. He had thought that they were completely in tune with each other by that point, and in every other way that had seemed to be the case.
But he had not noticed that she was unhappy, and for that he could never forgive himself.
He had watched her leave a second time, and had discovered that life did indeed go on in her absence. Her presence lingered in his apartment, their apartment, and for a while he felt as if he was living with the ghost of her, but as weeks and months passed, even the last forgotten possessions and the scent of her on the couch pillows faded into memory.
He didn�t try to contact her, and he eventually stopped watching the mailbox for a letter. He had never really expected one, not after the way they had parted, but for weeks he had checked it, barely able to contain his wary anticipation. He had never been a hopeful person, not before her, but she had changed so many things about him, and that had been one of them.
He flung himself into his work as if he were out for revenge, and could barely muster the strength to be disappointed when his candidate eventually and inevitably lost. He moved on to another job, another man, and by the time that man lost, two years had passed and he had begun to forget her.
There had been other women in those years, women who he had meant nothing to, and who had meant nothing to him. It was easy and uncomplicated and escapable, and that was what he was looking for. He had thought his relationship with her had been simple, but in the end it had turned out to be the worst kind of complicated�the kind that successfully masqueraded as something easy. So he found relationships that were that easy, and he tried not to notice that not one of them was actually a real relationship at all.
He had just decided that none of it was worth the trouble when he met Andi.
He had tried not to compare any of his women to what he had once had, because in the face of her, all comparisons were laughable. But in Andi he found a match for her, and it shocked him that he could feel such emotion for a woman who was not her. He had truly believed when she walked out his door that he would never feel that way for anyone again.
It wasn�t so much that Andi reminded him of her, although she did in small and subtle ways that he tried not to notice. She was different, and yet just as captivating. The conversations they had that first night, huddled over too many drinks in the bar of a fundraiser, were fluid and dynamic, and they were the kind of talks that he hadn�t had with anyone in far too long.
They met again for drinks, and then for dinner, and before long it had become something that he was actually comfortable calling a relationship. And when he would come home to his apartment he would find not the ghosts of a woman long since departed, but the subtle hints of a different woman, and he pretended that he couldn�t feel the guilt.
It was ridiculous, he told himself, to feel fidelity to a woman who had left him without a backwards glance. He had never been a sentimental person, and this irrational loyalty was new to him. He pushed it aside, as often as he was able, but some nights he would lie awake in his bed and think of her, and wonder who he was being unfaithful to�her or Andi?
In the end, he decided that the answer was probably both.
Andi had gone back to Maryland, and he had lost another election, and on the weekends they would visit each other, and talk occasionally about one of them relocating to be closer. It was always him, never her, because her future was there in her home state and they both knew it. But the thought of leaving New York left him feeling sick inside, and so they never talked about it for long. He knew in his mind that he would have a better chance at a true career in Washington, but there was a part of him that couldn�t reconcile itself with leaving his city, leaving everything he had known and everything that reminded him of her.
Then the ultimatum had come, and he had been forced to make a decision.
They were words he had heard before, �standing still,� �running in place,� and the similarity was what drove him to action. He would not make the same mistake over again, not if he could help it. And so he moved, with hardly a second thought, hardly a glance back, and as he packed up his apartment, he thought only of Andi, not of her. It was Andi�s words that ran through his mind as he prepared to leave the only home he had ever known, her confession that she could not keep doing this long distance anymore, that she needed something more from him, or it would be over.
So he moved to Washington, and lost his first election there at the same time Andi was beginning to plan her own race. Losing had become easy and expected for him, and he was beginning to count time not by years, but by losing candidates. In the meantime, he played the part of the supportive man in her life, and tried not to notice that it seemed like he was always trying to play a part with her.
At some point, marriage was the only step left for them, and so he proposed, and discovered that he was genuinely happy at the thought of spending the rest of his life with this woman. Years ago, he would have laughed at the image of himself as a husband, let alone one who was content in that role, but when he thought about a future with Andi, and a home, and children, it suddenly didn�t seem so far fetched.
It was just his luck, of course, that it was then that she returned to his life, and turned it all upside down again.
Part Five: I Made this Whole World Shine for You