The birthday of an independent lover.

Today it occurred to me, as it does every year on this day, that it was an old lovers birthday. I don’t wish to be mistaken and so its worth clarifying that I don’t mean lover in what would seem to be a simultaneous modern and traditional sense. Not a personified sexual partner but an individual onto which I have projected feelings of great affection. His birthday was on this day, the day of independence of one of the lesser nations, which is probably why I am most tended towards noting it each year. But it bares thinking of, especially seen as we are now so very independent of one another. He was my first experience of intense longing, of the overwhelming trust that someone can only give when they have no reason to yet believe all those stories of heartbreak and still hold a profound belief of their own immunity to loves great despairs. It is fair to say that he did succeed in squashing such an honest dependence with a boyish clumsiness and I will almost certainly never experience such a feeling again. I don’t hold him accountable for such a thing because we do not always know that we are one side of a triangle for another, that we support them without a single intentional push. And having not held him accountable, I do not feel the need to hold any sort of anger against a nearby inanimate object in place of him. I do not need this because I am aware that we all must fall, having our sides left unstable to know the cruel horizontal ground. And that having occurred a new form of dependence may be built. A stronger, deeper, informed dependence. A dependence which whispers, You know full well how much this could hurt, you have not forgotten, and you are willing to gamble that with them.
I may well have lost a dependence seated in youthful unawareness, but now I am able to knowingly reject independence with a wilful hand. Thank you always to my independent lover.