Two losts souls, swimming in a fish bowl

We all have them. We all regret them. We all look [not so fondly] back to our younger years, and we can't help but laugh at our naive little selves. You know what I'm talking about. Those people we were with, the ones we dated and thought [for some crazy crazy reason] that it was a good idea. As Peter Pan would say, we all clung to our happy thoughts [this is not recommended] and believed with all of our oh-so-hopeful hearts that this person was the one.

Of course, that's ridiculous to us now. After all, we've mat-yured.
Our perfect hindsight vision reveals to us the impossibility of it ever ever [even in the best of circumstances] working out with said person. But we went on believing, blindly bathing in the Tinkerbell's pixie dust, imagining that together we will one day fly off into wedded bliss.

The past few days I've been wondering what the point of all this is, this relationship thing. Do we even get anything out of it in the inevitable and oh-so bitter end? Why do we insist on thrusting ourselves right back into the muck of complicatedness? [Please note, this is not a reflection of my present circumstances with boyfriend.]

This brooding began two days ago when I took a diamond necklace that I received from my high school boyfriend to the pawn shop [I know, I'm a terrible person. Judge away.] I discovered this little jewel [pun intended] when I was moving into my new house. I wondered what in the world I was going to do with it since I could [obviously] never wear it again, when suddenly inspiration struck.

Forty dollars and zero regret later, I thought how awesome it was to rid myself of a tangible part of a long-ago relationship to which I have no ill feelings. It felt nice to be free, in this small way [not to mention have some gas money for the week.] I'm sure this was similar to how he felt when he took the time to delete every facebook message, post, or picture that had anything to do with me [I bet that took a while.] According to the Internet and my jewelry box, we never had a relationship. As far as they're concerned, six years of my life was just erased like the click of a button.

Now this is definitely not meant to be a "let's bash my first boyfriend" post. He was great. We had fun. And I have no ill wishes toward him and his wife. But selling that necklace got me thinking.

I wish I could cash in for everything else, ya know?
I wish we could go to the pawn shop and tell the nice, foreign man behind the counter how we spent X amount of minutes with a person, sent gobs of loving text messages, talked for way too long on the phone, laughed until the tears streamed down our faces, shared together, cried together, and, most importantly, we grew with this person. Weigh that Mr. Pawn-Shop-Man and tell me what it's worth.

Instead of making a quick forty, we're left with a hole inside of us when the cookies finally decide to crumble. Some endings bring more intense feelings of loss than others. But it always takes time, real patience, to get to feeling "normal" again. And I think that's because we can't cash in on the time and effort we put into a relationship, how much we emotionally invested in a person.

But we continue to throw ourselves out there, we persist in sharing and loving with our hearts on our sleeves. Because, in our heart of hearts, we all believe that one day [maybe not tomorrow and maybe not this week] but we all trust that we are going to find that someone with whom we can ultimately "cash in" absolutely everything.

And I think, maybe, that's better than a couple of twenty dollar bills.