Kissing in the Rain ☔ ✔

⛅️ 2

IT WAS HIM, she was sure of it. Five rows ahead of her on the packed Airbus A320 was Grant. He was tucking his bag into the overhead storage compartment, and even though Hayden could only catch a glimpse of his profile, she swore it was him.

The thought of Grant being just feet away from her was enough to send her heart into overdrive. To her dismay, however, when the man turned around to say something to the airline attendant trying to squeeze past him, Hayden realized that he was most certainly not Grant. However, the man's radiant smile and tousled brunette hair could have fooled someone else, someone who didn't know Grant as well as she did.

As she refocused her attention to buckling her seatbelt, Hayden's cheeks warmed from foolish embarrassment. Why would she see Grant on a flight departing from SFO Airport when the distance separating them had been the very reason for their split?

Unlike Hayden, who had been completely committed to Grant and game to make a long-distance relationship work, Grant had insisted they end their three-year long run before she left for Berkeley. He told Hayden that he wanted her to feel free to embrace whatever amazing opportunities came her way. While Hayden assured him she could pursue her academic dreams and simultaneously date him, Grant insisted that she enjoy her time at Berkeley without the extra routine chore of checking in on him and pouring energy into trying to make something work when there was so much distance between them.

Ironically, it was Grant's reluctance toward The Long Distance Relationship that nearly stopped Hayden from choosing Berkeley in the first place. It was his very attempts to push the thriving student towards her academic dreams that almost drove her to do the opposite, to stay in Vancouver so she could be with him. Hayden had lost her father, Landon, and (essentially) her mother in horrific ways, and not by choice. She didn't want to lose Grant too. Especially not when the love between them was so strong, so real. The relationship they had built together was quite possibly the best thing she had ever known.

Although at least if they did part ways, she could find some comfort in knowing there was a sort of normalcy to their ending. The realization that the both of them would be leaving each other to pursue great things and that they would be parting because they loved and cared-- truly cared-- about the other provided her with a solsace that had accompanied none of the other endings in her life.

And although Hayden had seriously considered for a moment the insane move of declining her offer of admission to Berkeley's Biostatistics program if it meant staying in Vancouver with Grant, she knew she would never be able to live with herself if she did. And neither would Grant. He had made it crystal clear to her that he hoped she didn't pass anything up because he had chosen to stay in Vancouver, where he'd landed a research position at a renowned lab. He wanted the best for her, even if that meant breaking up. Would he even have stayed with her if she'd declined the offer, or would he seen her as too clingy? Become overridden with guilt and view himself as the antihero in her story? Since receiving her offer of admission to the Californian school, she knew she was in a Catch 22.

Even though the right decision seemed obvious, the decision was still one of the hardest she had ever had to make. The act of actually, physically leaving Grant had been even harder. Maybe it would have been easier to leave, Hayden thought, if she got the impression Grant didn't want her anymore. But the look in his eyes and the way he held her all throughout their final night together and the next morning as they said goodbye at the airport revealed the exact opposite. And that was what made leaving so hard: knowing they both wanted each other but had to consider other aspects of their futures, which required parting ways.

While her days were filled with class, TA-ing responsibilities, and meeting new friends and acquaintences, her first nights in California were a different story. Every night for her first month in California, she would crawl into bed, pull her sheets over her shoulders, and wait for sleep to come. Except it never did. Instead, she would spend hours tossing and turning, pushing her sheets off then pulling them back up again, as she wondered whether she had made the right decision in leaving Grant, if maybe they might still have a future together one day.