“Good,” I tell her. Over the last three months since I last saw Kayla, things have been a bit challenging, a tad tumultuous, but otherwise great. Good changes are happening, anyways, and with change always comes an adjustment period.
I’ve been sober for nearly four months now. Four long, difficult, challenging months, but I’m fighting the good fight, day in and day out. The only thing I’m taking is a low-grade, non-addictive medication for my anxiety. I see my doctor once a week and because of that I don’t have to use any anti-depressants. It’s hard though, digging deep through my past and pulling up a million memories that I would have rather stayed buried. But at the same time, it’s making me more self-aware. It’s letting me accept the blame where it needs to be and to pass it off when it doesn’t. It’s helping me come to terms with the cards I’ve been dealt and why exactly I act the way I do. It’s painful but it’s fascinating and it’s worth it just to be able to manage my depression and anger without medication. Addiction starts from somewhere and you can’t ever get better until you attack the cause.
I’ve also taken up boxing. I know it’s not exactly something that flows well with rugby and I know my body doesn’t want to be under any extra strain, but boxing is something I’m naturally good at and it’s another way for me to get my aggression out. And, according to my physiotherapist, I’m still in excellent shape, maybe more so now than I was in my late twenties thanks to the absence of alcohol and the extra exercise. It might be more of a brain/body thing too, where your body responds better when your head and heart are happier, but I’m not too sure about that.
Because my heart…well, it’s happy enough. It’s beating. But it not operating at full capacity, to put it mildly. Kayla and I have been talking at least once a week and texting, emailing and messaging way more than that. But the space between us is always there. It’s not that we even have a long distance relationship because we stopped referring to ourselves as us a long time ago. After everything that happened, her mother’s death was too much for us to survive. The last time I told her I loved her was over a month ago and I got no answer. A few weeks after that, she casually mentioned that she met a guy at a bar and was going on a date. I guess she was asking me permission or something.
Obviously I wanted to be sick at the thought. It took a long time before I had the courage to talk to her again. I’m guessing nothing ever happened with the guy because she never mentioned him again and I’ve never seen anything on her social media either. I’ve even talked to Bram a few times and asked him. He said she’s been single, just trying to move on. I don’t know if that’s moving on from her mother’s death, from me, or both.
But my love for her has never wavered. Never ebbed. I might not say it anymore but only because I don’t want to make her uncomfortable if she’s clearly moved on. And the last thing I want is to rush her when she’s been through so much.
So I keep it to myself. But I hope she knows. I hope she can hear it in my voice, the way I laugh at her silly jokes, because bloody hell, can she still make me laugh.
And I know it might be easier if I didn’t talk to her at all. But that’s not what I want. I would rather love her, unrequited, secretly from afar and still have her in my life, then never talk to her at all. That’s not life to me. Life is something that she’s in, in any way, shape or form.
Loving Kayla saved me in the end. I owe her everything.
“Just good?” Kayla asks, bringing the conversation around.
“Well, the dogs are good and boxing is going well,” I add. “My old rugby mate Rennie is back volunteering, so that’s fantastic. Other than that…nothing has really happened in four days.”
“I quit my job,” she says.