LOVE WAS NOT THE FIRST TO DIE

Sometimes, two people can love deeply and still no longer fit into the same life. Yet TIME could not change who we were in the memories of those who came after.

We were two swords and, for a reason only youth could consider logical, we decided we needed the same sheath.

What we loved about each other was precisely what would later hurt us.

His stubbornness made me laugh. Mine challenged him.

I liked that he did not give in easily. He probably liked the same thing about me.

Neither of us had fallen in love with someone easy.

We knew that.

And, in a way, I think we also knew it might not last.

It did not stop us.

Before we were lovers, we had been friends. That was where it had truly begun.

In long conversations.

In laughter.

In the way we could tell each other things we told no one else.

In the freedom to be ridiculous without feeling ashamed.

We knew each other's weaknesses, and back then, we held them gently.

Neither of us imagined that one day, knowing each other so well would make us so dangerous to one another.

Then we got married.

I think we assumed love would build something over our friendship.

A roof.

A name.

A more secure "us."

At first, it really seemed that way.

We were two beautiful, reckless young people making room for each other in a life we had no idea how to build.

There was plenty of comedy too. Perhaps more than was entirely respectable.

Some of our arguments began dramatically and ended absurdly. At other times, one of us would say something so ridiculous in the middle of a storm that we would both burst out laughing and forget, for a few minutes, what we were fighting about.

That was what saved us.

Laughter.

And friendship.

As long as we remained friends, we could find our way back.

We could be furious, but somewhere, there was still the person you could say this to:

— Come on. Enough.

And the other would stop.

Or at least try.

There was still a place where we could lay down our weapons.

I do not know when that place disappeared.

There was no particular day.

No single argument I can separate from all the others and say: This was where the end began.

Friendship does not always die dramatically.

Sometimes it simply begins to go missing.

From a conversation.

From a joke.

From an evening when one person leaves something unsaid because they no longer trust that it will be received with kindness.

Then from another.

And another.

Until two people who once knew how to turn towards each other find themselves sitting back to back, without noticing how they got there.

We were left with love.

That was the problem.

Love was still there.

Enormous.

Stubborn.

Wounded.

But it no longer had anywhere to stay.

Friendship had been the room it lived in.

When that room closed, love began wandering through us without a home.

And homeless love can become a heavy thing.

It demands.

It accuses.

It remembers.

It keeps count.

It wants to be repaid for everything it has given.

We tried to save the marriage.

That was what we called it then.

Today, I think we were trying to resuscitate the friendship.

But it was already clinically dead.

We gave it mouth-to-mouth with memories.

We laid holidays, beginnings, photographs, and old jokes on its chest.

We reminded it who we had been.

Sometimes it seemed to come back.

For a few hours.

For an evening.

For a morning when the coffee tasted the way it used to.

Then it disappeared again.

And we grew better and better at something we should never have learned.

Hurting each other.

We knew each other too well.

We knew where the tender places were.

We knew which word would hurt.

We knew which silence would hurt even more.

The intimacy that had once made us tender had become a map for war.

Our pride did the rest.

It dug.

It gathered.

It remembered everything.

And slowly, it took us down to the dregs of hatred.

For us, anger did not mean love had disappeared. But we had reached the point of wanting the other person to feel how much we hurt.

You no longer want the other person simply to understand. You want them to feel it.

To feel how deeply you have been hurt.

And so you strike.

He strikes back.

You strike back.

Until two swords that once lay quietly in the same sheath do nothing but clash against each other.

At some point, we grew tired.

I do not think we became wiser.

Just tired.

We ended up in court.

I do not remember every detail of that day. Some have faded; others remain strangely clear.

I know we went in as husband and wife.

And came out as two people who finally had a piece of paper through which the state confirmed what we had known for a long time.

We could not go on.

We walked down the steps.

We set off together.

And somewhere along the way, we took each other's hand.

I do not know who reached first.

Perhaps neither of us.

Perhaps it was one of those old gestures the body remembers after the mind has signed all the papers.

Had someone seen us, they might have thought the court had brought us back together.

We had not reconciled.

We had not changed our minds.

We did not want to go back.

We were simply walking hand in hand.

Perhaps two swords had grown tired of being drawn.

That was all.

Then we truly went our separate ways.

Our lives took different directions.

Friendship did not return with the divorce.

It would take ten years.

Ten years to emerge from the ruins.

Ten years in which each of us had to live without proving anything to the other.

Ten years in which some wounds closed on their own.

Others remained, but stopped asking for explanations.

Anger lost its power.

Pride lost its voice.

Some memories stopped demanding justice.

Our memories began to settle differently.

The bad things did not all disappear. But at some point, they no longer took up the whole table.

There was room beside them for the good things too.

Laughter.

Madness.

Youth.

The way we had once looked at each other.

And, very slowly, friendship began to breathe.

Not the friendship we had started with.

That one had died.

Perhaps things that die never return quite as they were. But something else grew out of what had been.

Something quieter.

Without the claim that we belonged to each other.

Without promises.

Without the obligation to be right.

We began to be able to talk again.

To joke.

To remember.

To admit things.

And one day — I do not know whether it took any solemn occasion — we were able to say the truth that, during those bitter years, we would not have admitted to each other even under torture:

We loved each other.

God, how we loved each other.

Madly.

That did not make the marriage work.

It did not change the divorce.

It did not erase the ugly things we had said or the wounds we had left each other.

But it put the truth back where it belonged.

Perhaps love is not always enough.

We are proof of that.

But the fact that it was not enough does not mean it never existed.

For years, we confused the ending with a denial of the beginning.

Only after ten years could we allow both to be true.

That took me a long time to understand.

The fact that love cannot keep two people together does not make it false.

Some loves are real and still not enough.

Ours was one of them.

Today, I look at our wedding photographs.

Some have survived.

Others are in pieces.

Perhaps there is an irony here I could never have invented.

I hold the fragments and try to piece together two faces that, back then, knew nothing of what was coming.

I look at us, and I feel like smiling.

We were beautiful.

God, we were so young.

And so convinced that two swords could fit into the same sheath if they loved each other enough.

If I could approach the girl in the photograph, I would not tell her to run. Nor would I tell him to leave.

I do not know whether I would change anything. Perhaps I would look at them both and say only this:

Take care of your friendship.

Of your laughter.

Of the place where you can lay down your weapons.

Your love is strong.

So strong that it will endure even when the two of you no longer know what to do with it.

But if you lose your friendship, your love will have no home.

And then you will hurt each other trying to save it.

Perhaps they would not understand. They would probably laugh.

And do exactly what they did.

Get married.

Try.

Love.

Hurt each other.

Separate.

Walk out of a courthouse one day and, without knowing why, take each other's hand.

Then need ten years to find each other again.

Not as husband and wife.

Not as lovers.

As friends.

Perhaps that is the one thing we managed to save in the end.

And perhaps that is precisely why I can now look at the photographs without wanting to change the story.

Love was not the first to die.

Friendship died.

For a while, love had nowhere to go, and it burned us both.

But many years later, when the fire had gone out and the metal had cooled, friendship returned.

It settled quietly between us.

And only then could we say, without anger and without asking anything more of each other:

Yes.

We loved each other madly.

And for a while, two swords believed the same sheath could be home.

Thank you for reading and for spending a little of your time with my stories.❤️️