What do you say when you have no words left? What do you write when the phrases don't come to you anymore? How do you take your mind off of someone that you allowed to occupy every free thought? How do you walk away with finality from someone that you pictured by your side until eternity? Why can't you bring yourself to actually hate the person you love or, at the very bare, naked least, not like the small things they do that captured your amazement? Why can't you let go of something that took years to build, months to crumble, and seconds to disappear beneath the desert sands?
I do not know how to walk away from us, but the bridge stopped burning long ago. We've simply sat and watched the last embers smolder and suffocate in the haze that made tears stream from the flood gates of our souls. I can't even say that I know for a fact that you've cried for me at any point in months and months and months. But, I do know one thing without a doubt--when I sat you down at the park, bared my soul, put my heart through the scope down the barrel of your gun, told you my fears and my dreams, admitted my faults, proclaimed my endearing love, said I would want you, forever waiting, and reached my hand out for yours at what I knew as the last time the world would ever know “us” and life as we knew it would end--that I never saw it.
I never saw you wipe away a single tear. I never saw you get choked up on your words. I never saw you look at me. I never saw into your eyes. I only saw the side of your face as you tried to look unaffected. I only saw you distract yourself away from having to see my chest gaping as I held out my hand clutching my still-beating heart. I never heard you say you didn't want me anymore. I never heard you say you didn't love me anymore. But I heard you say that no matter where I go, I must never stay away forever, because I needed that extra bit of hope and rope to hang myself up and just within reach of your clutches.
I gave you everything I had at the end even after I said I wouldn't months before. I tried my absolute best, my hardest, the most genuine effort I could muster to convince you one last time not to walk out of my life as I had a dozen other times before. I spent dozens of hours, days at a time, insomnia-ridden nights in a row to craft you the most invested expressions of the things I had wanted to say but had not the courage until I knew I had already lost everything to lose. I poured my love, my passion, my literal blood, sweat, and tears into the mementos I gave to you as my way to say good-bye, because I can and will never say those two words to you. I can't know how.
I'm not sure where I lost myself in you again after I swore I would never let you that close to my heart again. But every time I made myself that promise you found a way past my defenses until you had deeply penetrated my wall. You knew me far better than I have known myself for far too long to admit. You saw through every defense I put up for protection and understood my thoughts in ways that I never could thwart. I know that you calculated and planned out your attacks with meticulous detail and coordinated effort.
I never stood a chance against you.
Even when I did stand a chance, I gave in to you every single time. I loved you more than I thought possible. I loved you deeper than I thought my chest could contain. I wanted you more than I have desired anything in this life. If you showed up on my doorstep right now and told me to run away with you I doubt I would say anything other than the only words that could ever speak to what we shared, “It's about damn time.”
Here I sit on another indistinguishable night spent alone staring at my keyboard blankly waiting for the inspiration to cease. I would love nothing more than to pull the woman I love close and lose myself in hair down the back of her neck for a few blissful hours of sleep; feeling that security of holding someone as close as possible knowing they long for no place other, for no one other, for nothing other. I cannot tell you when exactly I lost that feeling but I know what came to replace it.
Lying here staring into the depths of my eyelids, my mind circles the drain you put on my soul going round and round and the second I think the basin will empty I find a new way for you to carve your scarlet letter into my scarred leather heart. Every day I struggle to cope with losing you and the decisions I made that lead us to this point. Just as I told you the last time you responded, I do not blame you for not wanting me. I deliberately let our relationship crumble away while I watched you tread water alone. But I now know that I sank in the water while you watched me struggle to keep my head up all the while apologizing for dragging you down, holding you back, stagnating your drive.
Everything I feel overwhelms my soul and breaks my heart one hour at a time in sequence drawing up another painful memory from the depths of our years spent together. I suppose I might as well take the time now to write this out because I no longer have any presence in your life. I, in many, many ways, want to say that my decisions caused our failures, shortcomings, and eventual complete emotional breakdown.
I want to blame myself for all the things you tried to get me to understand time and time again while I lacked the humility to admit any of them. I want to put you on a pedestal and proclaim every amazing, wonderful, beautiful, strong, magnificent, captivating facet of you. I want to look back and speak of the immense amount of good and love that you brought into my life. I want to show people how you gave me strength when I had none. I want to marvel in the boundless limits that your love showed me in ways I had never known. I want to reach over to wake you up just so that I can tell you how much I love you even if you would never even remember it outside of a dream.
I want to do all of those things and so much more. I want to do all of the things I promised I would if you had ran away with me. I really, really do. I want to do them with you more than I have wanted anything in this entire life.
But I remember why I stopped wanting to do them. I remember why I stopped trying. I remember why I let you walk out the front door while I sat on the couch watching you willingly leave. I remember why I wouldn't and didn't ask you to come back again. I remember how many times you so easily walked out of my life within an hour's notice to your lifeline(s). I remember how many times I begged you on my knees not to leave. I remember how many times I sheepishly pleaded with you to come back. I would outright lie if I tried to say I remembered how many times I told myself I would not forgive another transgression only to bury one more of your skeletons in my closet.
For so long I could only picture my life with you there holding hands with me until the credits rolled. For so long I could only picture life with you in every detail and momentous occasion. For so long I could not picture life without you in it. Now, I look ahead and my heart breaks because I see no future for you in my life. I still cannot accept the inability to call you before anyone else for my every thought from the time I had a horrible cold and shot an alien out of my nose to excitedly telling you about the philosophical ideas and arguments you helped me develop that blew away my professors and peers.
I forgot how to picture life without you in it from that very first moment I opened the door to see you standing there already knocking me off my feet faster than my mind could cope. From that first second I only pictured life with you, never again imagining it without you.
Never.
Now, I sit here knowing that door has long since shut and will almost certainly never open again. I have no hope, no faith, no prayer that someday we will come back around and find everything we ever wanted in each other. I hold no breath for that day, instead, suffocating in a vacuum on the lack of air from our fake breathing.
The tears stream with the weight of knowing where we stand, knowing our end, our demise with all the finality of death minus that true closure. Instead, I sit here unable to look at the screen or even wear these glasses from the blurring of my vision. All the things I still want to tell you crush my chest and push the breath, the air, the life out in subdued sighs and self-inflicted slights. I have so many stories I still want to share, so many questions I want to ask, so many memories I want to create. I still have so much of my heart, my soul, my love to share with you and want nothing more than to prove it to you every waking moment.
But I know why we got to this point. I know why we stopped working. I know the point our relationship shifted away from the safe haven in our embrace we once called home. You told me countless times about how much we loved each other and the good times we had in 2013, the mid-way point of our relationship, and how much you wished we could go back to them. You asked me what happened but neither of us had the heart for the truth. We had strayed so far away from the fundamentals that grounded our relationship in humility and honesty. It took us six years to get to a point where we truly could live by the rule of never lying to make each other feel better.
Six. Fucking. Years.
We both saw the red flags from the very beginning. You tried to bail out early the night before the bombs fell. Then, the worst fucking morning of our lives happened and we formed a immovable bond in the forges of where heaven and hell intersect with lust, love, longing, loneliness, loss, and lies. Nobody can or ever will understand why we fought for each other for so hard for so long. How could they? Can you explain it to someone in a manner that actually touches the core essence of what makes them “them” in the same way our lives transformed and can never go back to before his death? How do you describe the feelings of utter helplessness we shared? How do you describe what happened when everybody left that night and we found our souls alone in the universe together, cowering in the plumb depths of our shattered consciousnesses?
That day, you stood as the true embodiment of everything and nothing that I wanted. How do you resolve telling me that didn't want me, that you had a boyfriend, and spend the day with him only to come back to my arms? I remember you telling me that he wanted to show some sort of support by offering to buy me a Boba Tea Co. drink but you wisely declined in my place to avoid that confrontation. What gave you the right to come back from that to take my hand and the place directly next to me for the days to come? And why then deny replacing me in the weeks to come only to walk out of my life, right past me on the way, and move in with him when I called you out on it the day before?
In my weakness I allowed you to take advantage of my frailty as a chance to break me down into something you could mold and transform into something grander. And you did that well. I know that nearly everything I have accomplished since that day came about because of your caring, guiding, loving hand that held mine during the most painful, tragic, and terrifying years of my life. I know that I would not have made it through the death, illness, and injury that came to punctuate life as we knew it.
You nursed me back to health so many times that I will forever love you and show my gratitude, appreciation, and humility for the nurturing care you gave to me. You gave so much of yourself to me time and time again. I became so intensely addicted to you that I still get the shakes when every cell in my body aches for your touch, your love, your disapproval, your disdain, your utter dejection. I simply took more and more until you ran dry had no more to give. And then I shrugged my shoulders with empty hands outstretched towards you.
How could anyone expect you to tolerate a guy that no longer fought for you to stay? How do you not leave a guy that showed such disrespect to you in the cruelest ways? How do you still love a guy that willingly and selfishly lets your life become more difficult for the sake of his own? How do you give so many chances for him to make it up, step up, and follow-through on all the big game he had talked about but forgot along the way? How do you simply move-on as if you feel nothing? How do you not sit awake at night staring at the moon and that one little star wondering about me? How do you do it?
Tell me the secret and I will follow it as the only religion I have ever known.
