Better to Have Loved and Lost?

Today finds me in introspective mood. It may be due to the large quantity of wine I consumed with Belle last night. It may be due to me reading Swearing Mother or the devastating end of a relationship here. But as I stand at the end of a friendship like no other, I'm starting to wonder if trying to turn it into something else was worthwhile after all.

We had known of one another for a long time, worked at the same company for years. Then I moved departments, to the same one as him, and ended up sitting opposite him. And he could really make me laugh. God knows, ours isn't the most interesting of jobs, so you need a bit of humour to pass the time. We became office acquaintances, people who would stand & have a chat if they met in the street.

Then we had our team Christmas meal.

There was an awful lot of drinking. Some eating. Then a lot more drinking. At some late point in the evening I decided that if I didn't leave now, then I would be getting an ambulance instead of a taxi, so I swayed drunkenly upright to leave. At some point, a lot of people seemed to have disappeared. Possibly into rehab. And it was nearly closing time anyway, so we all decided to make a move. We walked in the same direction, towards the taxi rank, outside the Grand Hotel in Birmingham, that's sadly no longer there. The taxi rank, centre of Birmingham, 2 weeks before Christmas, had a queue like the opening day of Harrod's sale.

He grabbed my arm, telling me to come on, we were going on somewhere else, to a party. He pulled me towards the door of the hotel, where we could hear the disco belting out Slade to drunken office revellers. I looked at him, aghast.

'We can't go in there. It's a private party. Look, there's a sign' (actually there might have been 2 or 3, I could certainly see more than 1)

It was a private party. He smiled politely to the doorman, told him it was nice to see him, and led me in. We danced, drank, laughed, talked. We talked to the office party people who assumed that we were friends of someone else. We said it was nice to put faces to names. When we left, we told them we'd see them back at work.

I wonder if they looked for us?

And we have been friends ever since. He knows more about me than any other friend. He has seen me through bereavements, divorce, grief, fear & misery. He has helped me become the woman that I am.

So were we right to try? I told him that we were, I asked him to try, I told him that we got on so well, there had been something between us for a long time, and unless we tried we'd never know if we were meant to be together.

When he told me that it didn't feel right, he smiled at me and said that at least we had tried.

But now I've let him go, the man that has saved me over & over again, & I miss him in my life.

Is it better to have loved and lost?

I would always have said yes, but now?