When My Future Was Too Big For You, You Just Walked Away
If we didn’t have a future then we shouldn’t have a present either.
Africa Studio / shutterstock By Allie Braun
You said we didn’t have a future anymore.
You said that you thought I was joking before when I told you what I wanted my future to look like.
You said that you didn’t really think about what that meant.
You said a lot of things while meaning something totally different.
You meant I never thought about you really being my future until now.
You meant I didn’t think your future was something I had potential to be a part of until now.
You meant you hadn’t really thought about what my future would do to your future until now.
I’m not the girl you want to marry is the one thing you never said but always meant.
I’m not the girl you will have kids with one day because I don’t want to have kids.
I’m not the girl that will willingly move back to your hometown and live two miles away from your parents because I want to go to a city that feels bigger than I can understand.
I’m not the girl you want to have a boring small-town life with because I will never be happy with that.
No, I don’t fit into that picture of what you want your life to look like.
And why not? Because I told you I wanted to do great things.
I told you I wanted to adopt eight kids because the world is already full of kids that need us so why make more.
Because I told you that I want a career and then a family.
Because I told you I want to live in the biggest cities in the world.
Because I told you I want to do something that is bigger than my life.
I had been telling you these things the whole time, of course, but for some reason, you decided that this time you were actually going to listen to what I was saying.
This time you looked for a place in the things I was saying, and when that place wasn’t where you wanted it, you got scared.
This time we were serious enough for you to think about our future instead of just yours.
And as you thought about it, you decided we couldn’t make it work.
If we didn’t have a future then we shouldn’t have a present either.
You said it would just be harder to end it the longer we stayed together.
You said that we needed to find other people who would be happier with the futures we both wanted.
I told you all about the life I wanted and you said we were over.
Allie Braun is a writer attending Furman University pursuing a degree in Sustainability Science. Her work focuses primarily on relationships, current events, and lifestyle topics. Visit her author profile on Unwritten for more.