The Long Way — Part II

I bet you’re wondering how I even got there to begin with. I know I told Shamari I just wasn’t happy, but it was never that simple.

It was the last dance stretched past closing time. Like standing in the bar when the lights come on, music fading, faces clearer, illusion gone. Knowing it’s time to go home.

Yet there I stood, swearing by a two-drink minimum, extending my Amex like an open tab, asking for a third. Even a fourth.

Oddly, I was always coherent.

My speech never slurred.

My vision stayed clear.

Only my heart staggered … asking for more long after I had reached capacity.

Each night I stayed, I delayed myself. I left later than I should have and became less honest about what I needed. I wasn’t confused. I wasn’t blinded. I simply hadn’t learned how to say what I needed without apologizing for it, or how to let my truth take up space without feeling like it was too much.

When I try to write about that version of myself now, she feels unfamiliar. I know what she did, but not how she understood it. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe that’s the point.

When I met him, adulthood felt close enough to touch but still undefined. I was learning how to hold my life together while everything demanded urgency: time, love, and decisions. Being with him felt like stability, like choosing something steady while the rest of my world asked me to grow faster than I knew how.

I didn’t yet know how to separate who I was becoming from who I was attached to, so I treated the relationship like an anchor. Something to hold while I figured the rest out.

We didn’t ease into each other. We carried weight too quickly. What we shared was real, but heavy. Neither of us knew where responsibility ended and affection began.

And when we broke up, nothing truly ended.

We stayed in conversation. Stayed familiar. Close enough to never fully let go. It felt like honoring something we hadn’t finished understanding.

Old patterns kept us longer than truth ever could. The known, even when incomplete, feels safer than stepping into a version of yourself you haven’t met yet. I wasn’t afraid of losing him. I was afraid of meeting the woman I might become without him.

I was scared of what would happen if I finally asked for what I needed.

Scared of what would shift if I stopped shrinking.

Scared of my own power, because truth would have moved me forward.

And suppressed truth doesn’t just silence you, it suffocates the relationship too.

By not saying what I needed, I taught him not to ask.

By avoiding hard conversations, confusion became normal.

By downplaying my feelings, emotional distance began to look like compatibility.

My silence didn’t just hinder me. It held us both still.

For a long time, it felt easier to place the weight of the ending on him. Parts of that story hold truth. But time reveals nuance. While he had his share in what went wrong so did I. The harsh reality is that my actions were the only ones I had full control over. We were two people who cared deeply but lacked the language to meet each other fully. I struggled to use my voice, and he often retreated when conversations asked for emotional depth. What we had was enduring, but it lacked the vulnerability required to make it transformative.

It took a different kind of connection later for me to understand what had been missing, not because it was healthier or meant to last, but because it was louder.

With Mr. Apt 302, everything felt immediate. Cinematic. The intensity didn’t equal sustainability, but it revealed something undeniable: I had been craving presence, direction, and a kind of emotional energy that made me feel awake.

The spark wasn’t proof of permanence.

It was proof of readiness.

By the time I met him, I was no longer the woman who stayed silent to preserve comfort. Parts of me that had been dormant were waking up, and his presence simply reflected that awakening back to me. The feeling felt powerful because it arrived at the exact moment I began recognizing my own desires without fear.

Chemistry can introduce you to yourself, but it cannot replace the work required to sustain intimacy. We moved quickly, carried by infaucation before foundation had time to form. What felt cinematic was real in feeling, but incomplete in structure.

The lesson wasn’t that I had finally found the right person. It was that I was finally becoming the version of myself willing to ask for more.

What I once mistook as compatibility was really contrast. One relationship taught me attachment without depth; the other taught me passion without commitment. Neither was wrong for who I was then, but together they revealed the balance I hadn’t yet learned to seek … a connection where I didn’t have to silence my needs or rush past them just to feel something real.

My ex couldn’t meet a version of me I was too afraid to reveal. And I couldn’t grow into who I was becoming while living inside the comfort of who I had been.

So we held onto each other in half-ways, close enough to feel something, but not enough to become anything real.

It wasn’t love that kept us tethered.

It was fear.

Fear of change.

Fear of loss.

Fear of becoming bigger than the spaces we built together.

I didn’t know it then, but when you outgrow a version of yourself, you sometimes outgrow the people that version chose, especially when they no longer are growing with you.

Mr. Apt 302 didn’t give me forever. He gave me recognition. A glimpse of what it felt like to be seen and wanted. But more importantly, he showed me something I was finally ready to admit: while my life had been evolving on the outside, my heart was still living in an old chapter.

Familiarity had felt like safety. But this new almost … this distraction disguised as possibility, showed me my heart was finally loosening its grip. The work I had done quietly was rising to the surface, ready to be lived instead of imagined.

It was time to trust the woman I had become.

Time to honor the alignment I kept praying for.

Time to stop revisiting places I had already outgrown.

And when the music stopped and the lights came on, this time I chose to walk out. To breathe new air. To let the night end the way it always should have.

Not with a dream.

Not with someone pretending.

Not with my ex.

Not with Mr. Apt 302.

It had to begin with me.

Taking the long way home, into a love that required the woman I was becoming.

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If you saw a piece of your story in these words or if you’ve ever taken the long way home to who you are becoming I’d love to hear what part stayed with you. Feel free to share your thoughts below in the comments or send this to someone who might need it right now.

I can’t wait for you to read with me again. The Interlude follows, a quieter chapter. A pause from dating, and the year and a half I spent alone learning how to sit with myself. It’s where bell hooks’ words stopped being theory and became practice, where love shifted from something I searched for to something I learned to embody.

Thank you for reading, reflecting, and walking this journey with me.

Until your next dose,

Tahj 🤍