Powder [phan]

XXXI

Dan's POV

I stopped at the door and looked down the hall, noticing how I was getting so dizzy that I couldn't possibly go down stairs. So I sat down on the top step and took a deep breath to calm myself down.

He was taken. He didn't love me anymore. And he wouldn't be the one I could give my love to. Unlike me, he had managed to find someone new to whom he could give what I had never been able to accept then and now I couldn't prove that I had changed.

It couldn't be him and the idea of trying it with someone else at some point, which had already been terrible in the clinic, was now so much more terrible after I had seen him again. Now that it was no longer just a thought that he might not be, but that I was deprived of any possibility of us getting back together. Because there was someone else in his life who had taken that place.

It was so brutal and I didn't feel able to get up from that step until I remembered what I had been taught in therapy. That I had to accept it and that it was okay and that perhaps I could forgive myself most easily if he was happy with someone else and I could no longer make mistakes that affected him and his feelings.

I heard them laughing about something through the closed door and I desperately grabbed my hair.

He was fine, he was safe, everything was fine. Everything would be fine, we would both find our happiness. I probably much later than he, but I too would be ready one day. Wouldn't I?

The selfishness in me struggled with me, this eternal belief that Phil was mine, even though he wasn't. As much as I wanted it, he didn't belong to me, and the despair over it won. The deep dark cloud came back and hung over me, raining down on me with its thick, black drops that weighed me down, trapped me like tar, making me stuck in place.

"Dan? You're still here!" someone said out behind me in horror and I turned around so I could be sure it was Phil, who I had actually recognized by his voice for the second time today.

I hadn't even noticed that the apartment door had opened and he had come out.

"What the hell are you doing here?" he wanted to know, but I kept quiet and looked back ahead.

"I wish I knew." I replied and heard the rustle of the garbage bag that Phil had been carrying, which I guess he put down. He sighed and sat down beside me.

"Dan." he said softly, somewhat reproachfully and also somewhat anxiously. As if he had to explain to a small child for the thousandth time why it wasn't healthy to eat pounds of chocolate and he didn't have to wonder if he had stomach ache now. So many times he had pronounced my name in this way, after all, I had worried him often enough and even if I didn't wish back these times, instead of starting a conversation, I wanted to hear him simply say my name countless times.

But I knew that he wouldn't grant me this wish, but would begin to explain to me why it was now much more over and done with than it actually was then. Than I should have been aware of.

I played around with a thread that had come loose on my trousers and just let it pass over me.

"I'm sorry." he suddenly said and my fingers froze. I looked at him and he looked at me with a look from which all his pain that had existed between us in the past could be seen, but also the deep, unique connection, because of which we were probably still sitting here together after all this.

"Don't be sorry. I should be sorry. I'm sorry." I was talking in front of me and Phil put his hand on my knee. "I'm so fucking sorry."

"I forgave you." He said right then and there, I looked at him in shock. He forgave me? How could he forgive an asshole like me? I swallowed hard.