Funny how things turn out.  When I and the ‘Other’, were younger, utterly obsessed with each other, inseparable, intensely passionate, we would look around at other people’s relationships with naive simplicity; noting with moral outrage, how others would argue in public, put each other down or ignore one another.  In our yet untarnished view, we vowed we would never ‘end up like that!’  Our passionate selves could not imagine ever getting to the stage where we had nothing to say to each other or could be bored in one another’s company.  Grumbling about one another openly to others was anathema to us, how could one be so disloyal?  We could never imagine a time when we would not be endlessly fascinated in each other and  we agreed, that in the unlikely event that we should ever find ourselves like this, it would be time to part.

Too many years later, I look back on my youthful self and wonder at the cool certainty of those strongly held views and wonder at the nerve in judging other people.   For slowly, gradually and painfully, we have, in other ways, become like them, we have compromised.  It seems the intensity of our feelings could not be sustained, like a bright burning star, we crashed and died. We have developed our own patterns of behaviour that our younger selves would be scornful of. Sometimes I am struck by the loss of our former selves.  It is  like a death that has not been fully mourned.  We remain together but we are not together.  We live in the same house with little more intimacy than two house mates.  We have long since rubbed off the sharp corners and the small irritations that remain, are carefully navigated around.  Things that were once so important and urgent have diminished, the fire in our bellies for each other, has long burned out and only a faint apathetic flicker remains. 

And into the frail shadow of our former selves where the tie between us lies so thin, comes illness.  Illness that shows no sign of improving or ending.  Where once I willingly bound myself to him, I now cannot excape the bindings.  I am bound by duty, responsibility and all that we once were to each other.  And all the while this illness encroaches in our lives, I am in limbo and so is he.  There can be no plans for us.  Spontanaety is crushed, plans pointless.  Our world has become small.