It was unfathomable to hold the belief that few couples never argued or fought. It was a simple fact of life through relationships whether that be platonic or romantic.
And for anyone claiming that they don't, must simply be lying.
I'd experienced it first-hand with my very own parents for months on end during high school, and although I respected the fact that they once fell in love and thought that they would grow old together, they were never really meant for one another in the end. They would both find someone new amongst the countless soulmates I believed that we have in this world, and they would be happy again.
For Josh and I, it was relatively simple.
In trying times when we disagreed on what felt like pertinent ideas at the time, we yelled and fought with our contrasting need to be bitterly right. Our personalities hit heads more times than once, diverging from the very reason that we fell in love in the first place.
We were equally at fault for the discrepancies between us, and yet a resolution could always usually be found, one I would rely on like my last founding breath.
It was a habitual fact we'd both grown used to over the years, assuring ourselves that we were just like any other couple with jealousy and heartache playing a fundamental role in the foundations of our growing relationship.
Even so, that naïvety would still create the cracks I would begin to find between us.
Through the years spent together, we'd managed to emotionally beat each other down with the use of our words and actions, convincing ourselves that our underlying attraction for each other would always reconcile it. We would apologise profusely and claim to never mean the words spoken before, but we always kept it to ourselves that we knew the other was wrong, refusing to believe otherwise.
Our relationship had manifested itself towards the end of high school, notably in senior year before making it through prolonged and tedious journeys to see each other during our college years and to this moment, living in a decent-sized loft apartment together in New York, having followed half of our friends across the country to start a new life together in a new city.
But New York was different to California.
There were differing pressures to being together while living at home with our families and to waking up beside each other every morning. It was something I had myself convinced would be exciting and unchallenging because we were in love, and I trusted that our relationship could and would withstand anything it came up against.
With pushing all of the persistent doubts to the very back of my subconscious mind, I had managed to always remember how much I truly loved Joshua Parker. Despite every disagreement, we were both matched on the adoration and affection that only we knew we could provide. There was no hesitancy in knowing that Josh was my soulmate – the one that counted.
I was utterly and irrevocably in love with the man I wake up to every morning, and although I was certain that nothing would ever change that, I couldn't help but sense our compatibility breaking with the pressures provided by our own doing.
I never danced on the thoughts that my situation would fall under the category of right person, wrong time, but every now and then, the idea would brush through to the forefront of my mind, managing to hit and damage a nerve I never knew to exist.
This actuality became a little more concrete on a late Thursday evening when Josh arrived home from work, having pushed himself once again in order to stay past the initial closing hours of his office building. He was diligent with his career, focusing on progression with a motivation that he somewhat lacked during high school.
However, none of that concerned me. Occasionally, I would stay a little later in the office, despite being placed under the very minimal salary as a journalism intern. It was standard for young people like us to be climbing the career ladder in any way we had access to, so I could never not turn a blind eye to Josh's sporadic late nights.
I was stood in the kitchen area of our open planned yet minuscule apartment, half stirring the almost boiled spaghetti and half singing along to a cooking playlist I had created a few weeks ago when the sounds of Josh's key turning perked up my ears. We'd been somewhat lucky with our living situation. Albeit, the location was marginally unsafe, meaning that it was a first for me to attach both my rape alarm and my pepper spray to the same keyring for when I walked alone at night from the subway station to our apartment lobby.
Our bed sat comfortably in the middle of the room, occupying a majority of the space around yet giving it a homely feel all the same. We had picked out the cream cotton bedding after a particular disagreement shared between us in the middle of target with our conflicting taste in home decor.
Our bathroom was the only space occupied by a closed room, posing as a memoir to our many sexual escapades, predominantly to escape the clear view of our common activities through the extensive loft windows. It wasn't anywhere close to a penthouse apartment in the upper east side, but it was us and it was all we needed.
"Tough day?" I pondered out loud with the incoming sound of an exasperated sigh escaping Josh's lips. He placed his laptop bag down by his feet before collapsing down into the couch across from my view in the kitchen.
"That's a simple word for it."
Apprehension soaked through my veins as I turned the stove back to zero and rounded the kitchen counter to close the distance between us. His features were exhausted when his unusually despondent eyes found mine. My eyebrows furrowed as I slouched down beside him, facing his body with my arm resting up against the head of the couch.
This evening and Josh's physical sentiments felt somewhat disconcerting as I simply awaited his explanation for his day. I pulled myself closer to him as a response to my natural instincts and placed a comforting hand down onto his shoulder, only for his body to flinch back like a fresh burn I had inflicted.
"We need to talk about something, Savannah," he pulled stiffly away from my touch and stretched his head and body forward over his knees.
"What is it?"
His fingers found the soft skin between his eyes, pressing hard in order to rid what I assumed to be an incoming headache. He refused to look my way, which posed as an already clear indication that something was already wrong.
"I just don't think we can do this anymore."
My mind reeled with the possibilities of the meaning behind his words, denying what was possibly right in front of me. "What are you talking about?"
"I just—I don't think we should keep trying at something that obviously isn't working."
I shook my head, mostly with feigned confusion, "I really don't want to hear about what you think right now Josh, what are you trying to say?"
Josh wouldn't be brave enough to cause this very unearthly pain to creep through my body and retort back with telling me that it was all just a joke. My heart rate climbed to a dangerous level as I retracted my touch from the unfamiliar person now sitting in front of me. I wished for a punchline, and not for the display of regret and punishment occupying Josh's eyes.
Body language was everything when it came to Josh. As a man of very few words, I would watch his expressions to know what he was thinking, knowing exactly when he was upset, when he was angry, when he was jealous, and especially when he was telling the truth. Unfortunately, that particular moment happened to be now.
"I want to end things."
"You're lying," I stood up from the couch, attempting to convince myself that this truly was a cruel prank and that Josh was just toying with his own pleasantry after a long and harsh day at work, "please don't joke with me right now."
"I really wish I was."
The words were sounded as a whisper with pain disguised beneath his voice. My eyebrows furrowed at his confusing choice of expression, deviating from a simpler way of telling me that we were over.
"No, you don't mean that," My voice raised itself in volume without realising, echoing off of the laid brick walls of the room, "did I do something wrong? Where has this come from?"
Our relationship had been anything but smooth sailing, but I knew as much that we were both in it for the long haul – I couldn't fathom being with and spending the rest of my life with anyone else.
He leaned forwards and rested his elbows down onto his knees, concealing his face from mine and disallowing my eyes to find his. At the same time, I had been torturing my mind in search for what could have possibly changed from yesterday, when he kissed me passionately on top of the kitchen counter as if we had just fallen in love all over again.
"You did nothing wrong," he reached for my hands, causing me to withdraw hastily in a ditch effort to maintain the distance, "I don't think this is working between us, I need to be on my own for a while."
"Do you still love me?"
I hated myself for asking the question. It was foolish to assume that he would dare to answer it the way I thought he would after all those years together.
"I don't know, Savannah. I just think we need a break, indefinitely. It's not you, it's—"
"Don't give me that fucking line," I swallowed the pride remaining at the back of my throat and edged further back to the kitchen, "get out, Josh." I felt somewhat flustered as he made his way towards me again.
"We need—"
"I said—GET THE FUCK OUT!"
He pitched his hands into the air and finally stepped back, allowing me the space that I most definitely needed right now.
"I'll collect my things tomorrow."
A breath of finality escaped his lips as he made his way to the door, pulling it open and slamming it shut again, hammering the last nail in the coffin of our relationship.
There was little strength left in my body as I made my way to the kitchen sink, unknowing of whether I felt the need to be sick or to drink dry our entire alcohol cabinet. I just needed to rid the pain.
I had never been heartbroken like this before. It was an unrecognisable ache that spread from my heart to the very outer extremities of my body. I was burning hot and freezing cold at the same time as I searched restlessly for a glass and the closest bottle of alcohol I could find.
My hands began shaking with the glass between my fingers, held onto the counter for more stability than what currently ran through my body. I felt the growing dryness of my lips as I fought to unscrew the cap of the bottle in my other hand.
The coarseness of the first salty tear fell down past my nose and to the top of my lip, hydrating it somewhat with undesired means. I pressed my body hard against the kitchen counter in an attempt to re-direct the pain elsewhere, to feel something other than the growing torture in my heart.
I took several shallow and unnerving breaths as my hands fumbled around for the glass again, only to knock it harshly into the sink, the cracks spreading out across the marble. "Oh—god," my voice was faltered as I mistakenly reached down to the glass, once again averting the pain to the skin between my thumb and forefinger when I spotted the deep cut running down to my palm.
My legs eventually gave way as I slipped down to the floor and held my now throbbing and bleeding hand between my other. My body was beginning to numb with every breath I managed to take.
Most say that the heart was made to be broken, that it is caused to make it stronger, but not one person had warned me about the unbearable punishment I would experience with just the act of breathing alone. I was thrust into grieving the loss of a person that could still walk while I was suffering down on the ground.