Time is not a fluid movement through space as we would like to believe. The three seconds before he spoke time slowed to an almost complete stop. I could hear every breath of every person in the hallway, every step beating on the ground, and every syllable in the words of the conversation next to me. Time slowed to the point where light no longer traveled fast enough to reach me. I was in a black hole and nothing could touch me. I was floating freely through the universe with no one to catch me or push me.
I had loved Oliver for 9 months, 7 days, 2 hours and 57 minutes. Like when a person describes dying, our entire relationship flash through my eyes from our first kiss to when he said he loved me to this very moment. My memory flipped through all 9 months, 7 days, 2 hours and 57 minutes of kissing, loving, fighting, and wishing he was where I was.
Movies tell you that love is going to be dramatic. They tell you that there will be great times and there will be horrible times. You learn from these movies that in these times you must learn how to forgive, to compromise, to forget. They give you every possible solution to every possible relationship problem under the sun. But they never warn you that you will get bored. They show you the first kisses, and the hate kisses, and the I-will-love-you-for-the-rest-of-my-life kisses because those are the most interesting ones. But what they will never show you are the hundreds of the day to day kisses. The ones that might as well just be a hug or a wave of the hand because they mean little more than hello or goodbye.
I may have loved these movies all my life but I was not naive enough to not know it was coming. I knew exactly what he was going to say and I still didn’t know what I was going to do about it. I knew I wasn’t going to cry but I didn’t know what I was going to say to him. I wanted to crawl in a ball and hide in a corner. I wanted a black hole to suck me in with its gravity never let me escape so I never had to feel the pain of the cold cruel universe any more.
I strung out my three seconds far longer that was allowed by the rules of physics. He pulled in a breath as if what he was about to say would hurt him. I loved him with all my heart, but I hoped it hurt him. I wanted him to feel the pain I was going to feel. His brown eyes that had once sparkled at my sight, looked dull and bleached. They had lost all the promise they once held for me.
“I kissed her”
“I know”

And the world had stopped