Almost Is Never Enough

Almost is never enough. It’s a hollow place, a minimal space where chivalry and mannerisms go to die; a landscape where the possibilities of love, of connection, of something real, always fall at the feet of "so close, yet so far." I’ve learned to see these things in real time. It’s like fast-forwarding through a movie I’ve already watched—I see the ending while we’re still at the beginning, watching the cracks form before the weight is even applied. Some people call that pessimism. I call it pattern recognition.

The day began in a graveyard of almosts.

I stood in the centre of the back room, surrounded by twenty years of boxed-up chaos—the headstones of a life that no longer fit. Dust hung in the air like a fine mist, catching the morning light in suspended glitter. The room smelled like old paper, forgotten summers, and the kind of memories you don’t revisit unless you’re forced to. My body already thrumming with the familiar, white-hot heat of CRPS. Pain doesn’t just hurt; it occupies you. It has a presence, a personality, a gravitational pull. Today, it arrived early.

The hooks dug deep into the marrow, tugging with a steady insistence that made every movement feel like a negotiation. But I kept going. I pressed putty into a jagged crack in the wall, my movements slow and deliberate. Subject M42 leaned against the doorframe, beer already in hand, watching me with a look that wasn't quite help and wasn't quite appraisal. He was waiting for the 'Saviour’s Tax'—the emotional currency earned by making someone doubt their own hands so you can be the hero who “fixes” them.

I had picked the colours—Elm Branch and Ellen Half—hoping the muted tones might bring stability. But stability wasn’t his interest. Stability doesn’t give a man like him anything to correct.

“I don’t want to argue,” he said—the preface to every jab he’d thrown since sunrise. “But your paintwork is… well, it’s messy. You’re missing the edges.”

There it was. The first crack of the day. Not in the wall—in the dynamic. I inhaled the bait and exhaled my peace. He wanted to plant a seed of self-doubt; I refused to water it. CRPS teaches you to read your body; men like him teach you to read the room. Both were telling me the same thing: Something is off.

By the time we stepped onto the deck, the day had begun to sag. The sun turned the river into a sheet of molten gold. Seven black swans glided in a perfect, silent circle. Large koi drifted beneath them like orange ghosts. The world was performing serenity, but serenity is useless when your nervous system is bracing for impact.

There was no Thai food. No board games. Earlier, he’d admitted he didn’t know what games he was “good at.” His ego was too fragile to risk another night like the history trivia debacle, where I’d swept the board and he’d been left with two correct answers and a bruised temper. If he couldn’t dominate the game, he wouldn’t play.

He cracked his twelfth can. The personality shift was subtle—a sharpening of the eyes, a tightening of the jaw. Alcohol made him sharper, meaner, more certain of his own imagined authority.

“If you could be any animal, what would you be?” he asked. “I’d be a tiger-elephant. A hybrid.”

“A Gryphon,” I replied.

He scoffed. “Those aren’t real. That’s a stupid choice.”

“Neither is a tiger-elephant,” I said. “But a Gryphon is about vigilance. Seeing truth from a distance.”

“You’re not happy,” he insisted, leaning into my space. “You’re not proud of yourself. I can tell.” There it was—the rewriting of my inner world. I watched the swans instead. They didn’t need permission to exist.

Then Paelah walked out.

She hijacked the oxygen, positioning herself between us with rehearsed precision. Her shoulder was a deliberate barrier. She didn’t look at me, not really. Just a flicker—a smirk sharp enough to slice. Their conversation became a private loop about FIFO shifts and shared history. I watched them perform familiarity like a shallow game of Connect Four while I sat three moves ahead in a game of checkers they didn’t even know existed.

“My pain isn’t getting better,” I said, cutting through their back-and-forth. “I need to go. Now.”

“What, right now?” he asked, annoyed.

I walked to the car and sat in the dark. When he finally came out, he brought a shield instead of comfort.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m in pain,” I said. “And I don’t fancy sitting there being uncomfortable while you two have a private chat. It’s rude.”

The explosion was instantaneous. He screamed, calling me irrational. Crazy. He defended his “need” to talk to Paelah with a ferocity he never once showed for my comfort. He pulled out of the driveway too fast. “You’ve done this, mate. This is all you. We’re done.”

I turned my face to the window. I didn’t argue. There’s a moment in every unravelling where you stop trying to hold the threads together. You just let them fall.

He slammed the brakes at a junction. “You can go this way,” he snapped, pointing left, “or that way,” pointing right. I stared at him, genuinely confused. He didn’t explain. He simply cut the wheel hard, swerving across the opposing lane as the tyres shrieked. He dropped me at the house we’d spent the day painting—the house I was locked out of. He knew the drive to Evergreen Cove was long and dangerous in the dark. He didn't care. He sped off, tyres skidding on a strip of road where children and wildlife play.

The drive to Evergreen Cove was sixty minutes of pure terror. CRPS flared like a biological wildfire. But beneath the agony, clarity arrived. He didn’t care that I was in pain, or locked out, or that my vision was blurring. He cared about winning. He cared about protecting his ego. And I had been shrinking myself to make room for that.

Forty-five minutes in, my phone buzzed: Babe we had plans for tomorrow.

Plans. As if plans could erase the screaming. As if plans could erase the smirk. Almost. Almost cared. Almost tried. Almost loved. Almost is never enough.

The lights of Evergreen Cove appeared—soft, warm, familiar. I wasn’t mourning him. I was mourning the parts of myself I had misplaced trying to make "almost" feel like enough. But I found her again—in the silence, in the pain, in the clarity.

I was the long-distance relationship that needed to come home. And I finally did.