Her name reminds me of a flower.
I'm trying to figure this whole thing out, but I think I might be going at it from the wrong angle. A broken-off engagement two winters ago, and the subsequent 'throw yourself at anyone who will open her legs for you' phase as I trod through the rubble of the home we would share, and here I am, thwarting 4 billion years of evolution and however many kajillion base pairs of nucleic acids in my genome, all of which are aching, just aching to duplicate themselves towards ends more noble than mere damage control. Pheromone receptors in the olfactory bulb, just aching for the molecules that would unlock their neurochemical cascades. Alpha waves and appendages. But the quiet part of my mind that wants it to stay quiet for a while whispers: "Wait a minute --- what do you want, anyways?"
And all is still. The moment you stop looking, you find more than you can ever ask for.
She's older than me, not so much in years, but in everything else that counts. She's patient with my aloofness, understanding me better perhaps than I understand myself. She saw me get misty-eyed at the poetry reading we attended ---
"You, you got the best of me / And now I pity the one who gets the rest of me..."
--- so I guess she saw something in that.
This might just be the much-dreaded state of being 'just friends', but honestly, I don't think I want much more than that. Our lives are diverging at the fork in the road we're standing at right now, and honestly, after a lifetime of being emotionally stunted and holding the world at arm's length, I finally feel like a human being. I'm emerging, and she's been around the entire time to see it happen.
So she's moving up North to work on a farm. I'm moving to South America,
if all goes well, where I'll shit my guts out and, hopefully, do it in the
latrines I help install before the amoebic dysentery gets too bad. She once mused that all her past boyfriends all go off and do amazing things thousands of miles away, and she never sees them again. This happened to me as well, I replied. Maybe she's realized something, too. I wish her well, but not without the hope that one day, our paths will cross again.
So, in conclusion: I don't think there's a decision to be made here. There is a lot of appreciating to do, however, and I better get around to it before she sinks under my horizon.