My Turf

Eight years, a marriage, and three kids after, she still describes him as her soul mate. Not even her husband, who she also loves dearly, fit that title. And Charlie, now on a limbo, living a life of changing-girlfriends-every-two-years, will never, never know that eight years ago, what he deemed a broken, irreparable love actually stood a chance.

A decision, one he made in a moment he did not at all think of as pivotal, threw it all away for Hilda and him forever.

At some point in our lifetimes, each of us encounters our one great love. Such encounters, sometimes prolonged, sometimes brief, affect us so completely that we are never the same after. 

“He’s my greatest love,” Hilda says.

“She’s my greatest love,” Charlie says.

If this is so, one is led to wonder, why are they not together?

In their desolate moments, they each come up with their own rationalizations. To Hilda, fate called the shots. Charlie unknowingly had a shot at it but chose to let it go.

Hilda, eight years back…

“We’ve broken up more times than I care to count, but I love you still,” Hilda thought as she agitatedly walked back and forth in the hotel lobby where she asked Charlie to meet her.

The latest in a string of painful goodbyes had been the ugliest. Words, meant and unmeant, were uttered with such pain and hatred that both walked away convinced that that really was the end of it.

While Hilda so desperately wanted to cling on to the promise of “One great love,” she had greater faith in the power of something infinitely bigger than her: Destiny.

“If Charlie doesn’t come tonight, then that means we’re really over. If he does, then I’ll marry him,” she swore to herself. There was no other man she imagined spending a lifetime with, but she needed to be sure.

The clock was ticking and Charlie’s nowhere in sight.

Charlie on the flip side

He was sitting in his car. He’d been there for over an hour. Wanting, more than anything, to get out and meet her at the hotel lobby as he promised in their curt conversation the night before. “What else could she want?”

He didn’t think he had the strength to see her again—he was still reeling from the pain of the latest breakup. He didn’t think he could take another round of getting his hopes up, then seeing them crushed right before his eyes. A man could only bear so much disappointment.

“If you want closure, I’ll give you closure,” he angrily thought to himself as he backed up the car and drove away.

Present time

Eight years, a marriage, and three kids after, she still describes him as her soul mate. Secretly, he also thinks the same about her. 

“I would have married him if he only came.”

But there’s no point in Charlie finding that out now, is there? Neither is there hardly any point in Hilda knowing that Charlie did indeed come, sitting prostrate in his car, deathly afraid of her, deathly longing for her, right outside that hotel lobby.

If only he knew. If only she knew.   

Why are they not together?

“I got scared,” he admitted.

“Fate said so,” she asserted. 

“Because we spent too much time waiting,” they concurrently realize, even in their separation.