text: "Run away with me." Her pale blue eyes glistened in the fading sunlight, shimmering with hope and joy. Her childish tone and mellifluous voice washed over me, drawing me into the idea. The words she said could not be taken back, and our conversation snowballed before my eyes. "Run away with me," she repeats, a hint of desperation creeping into her voice. Four words that offered so much promise yet so much fear. I could see myself with her, my other half, living beyond the world of parents and responsibility. Perhaps we would rent a small apartment somewhere in the Midwest, or perhaps we would travel the world together. The imagination is a powerful thing, and these four words grasped onto mine and let it loose. I saw my future with her; the future is blurry at best, yet it is with her. As the words hung in the air, I studied her face and she mine. Wisps of hair splayed out from their dark home, struggling to remain independent of their raven black origin. A few strands fell across her face, perhaps trying to conceal the hurt that lay within her eyes as she understood my answer. Her lips touched mine, and a single inaudible word drowned out the rest. "Please." The strength of her ensuing silence tore my heart and I struggled to return to a few minutes before, when all that mattered was staring deeply into those same gorgeous eyes that now begged me to relent. I struggled to respond, finally managing to squeak out "why?" "Because you love me, because you promised me anything, and because I need to get out of here." "I hate that word." "But you love me." "I do." "Say it." "Not yet." "When?" "I can't answer that." "I love you though." "Debatable." As she registered my words, I lost myself in her smile. She had a smile as bright as the sun, a smile that could drown problems in a sea of happiness and desire. Aphrodite herself would have been jealous. Yet the quintessence of her smile existed in her mind. She did not even begin to grasp the beauty of her smile, constantly insisting that she had flaws. To another, maybe she did have flaws. In my mind, these were what made her perfect. "Are you even listening to me?" "Did you know you have the most adorable smile?" "Run away with me." "No. It's not going to work now. Maybe in the future." I had to look away as the hurt surged in her eyes, and I felt tears begin to form in my own. I had to do this, I had to be strong. She was my everything, my alpha and my omega, yet our time was ending. Very much like summer turns to winter, the heat and passion of a relationship turn to distance and cold. For once in my life however, I felt myself clinging to the summer and dreading winter. As is human nature, I longed to turn back the wheel of time so as to spend the rest of my life in that moment before I said no, that moment when her eyes shone like diamonds and when the light reflected through her black hair to completely dazzle me. Reality hit me hard, as I saw the tears in her eyes and felt the tear in my heart. I fought the urge to take everything back, I told myself the right thing had to be done. She needed to move on; I was merely an anchor, tethering her to the past when she deserved a bright future. The human heart does not accept logic, rather, it longs for what it cannot hold onto. She had become an ideal in my heart, the basis for which all of my following relationships would be compared to. This girl, whose imperfections made her perfect, whose love improved my empty heart, and whose smile brightened my darkest day, would leave my life in a heartbeat. She understood. She knew our relationship could not live, yet she tried to resuscitate it with that soul stealing smile. "I know you love me." "Love means being able to let something go. You were always to good for me." "Yet you're the one ending it. Who's too good for who?" "I'm your anchor. I hold you back. You could be so much more and you settled for me. You had a better guy, he made you happy." "He wasn't you." Those words felt like a knife twisting in my chest, and I'm left speechless as she starts her car and drives away, away from her past and into the future. This had been my goal hadn't it? She's better off now right? Idiot. "I love you.