Untangle me

I was okay being alone before I met you. I used to feel just fine. Now I am haunted by the nights I spend alone. This love has plagued me with a loneliness I never knew existed. One I couldn’t have foreseen. I shiver beneath the blankets of my own bed. Eyes wide, I wait for the sun to shine through the cracks in my curtain. To whisper to me that day has come, and I can abandon my nighttime terrors for now. I feel weighted. I keep waiting for your call. I miss the hush in your speech, the grogginess and rasp between your words. A voice slowly slipping from my memory. Where are you? I need you. Be here. 

It’s been much easier to let go of you than I once dreamt it would be. I thought after all these years this would be violent and painful and full of heartache. I thought that I would miss you desperately but I don’t. I feel nothing for you anymore, not even longing for the girl you used to be. It feels as though this was a long time coming, as though a weight has been lifted from my shoulders and it revealed a me the lightness of a feather. You’ve used me and expended me of all I have. I am empty and lonely but I have never been more ready to start again. I am floating through life with a joy I haven’t seen in ages. Good riddance my former friend. I wish you all the best.

If I was a better writer I’d write poems everyday with his name in them. Beautiful Shakespearean sonnets. Enough of them to fill an entire book, one that people would read hundreds of years later and still admire just how painfully in love I was. Each stanza would tell a story of our lives together, a story for every day we spent. That way I’d never forget all the things he does to make me smile. 
I want to remember everything. 

I’ve been terrified beyond measure to lose my love, I’ve been paralyzed by fear. I have spent agonizing months holding on too tight, strangling myself with the need to be appealing, lovable, perfect. But goddamn, clarity can be a little bitch sometimes. But she’s healed me more than she’s hurt. 

is there a little special left?

I’m beginning to learn that heartbreak happens slowly.
Before now I had always imagined having my heart broken all at once, shattered into splinters with a single wound. But it’s becoming quite evident that the heart fights to stay together. Every hurtful word or act of betrayal deepens the point of the pickaxe into the organ ever so slightly.  The pain starts small like a tiny nick until it grows in due time into a festering infection of agony. But all the while your heart is rejecting the foreign object, trying to force it out of your body and to heal the wound before the damage is irreparable. Some hearts are lucky enough to succeed; some love can be rebuilt. But my vital signs are looking rough and I’m not sure that I’ll get better.

Lately I’ve been feeling like just an object, rather than your object of affection.

His words burned like poison on an open wound. Yet I continue to take the blame for the way I was scorned. I accepted those words, embraced them as if they were created then and there to describe me. I was the creator of those foul names, I gave them meaning. I was their meaning. Sometimes, when we bring it up, I remember that I am nothing more than the sum of those words and the way they made me feel. But I have nobody to blame but myself. That should have been my key to walk away and never turn back, to realize that I am worth more than a few drunken words piled on the ground. Leaving had been my intention all along, hadn’t it been? Was that not what I was planning to do in the first place? This event should only have made it easier; yet for some reason after such a vile confrontation, leaving no longer seemed like an option. 
          That day haunts me, second to only one. I replay it over and over in my head and I listen to the anger in his voice as he laughs and spits at me. Still I felt cruel and vicious, that I somehow caused this unbearable outburst, and in turn was deserving of the pain bubbling in the pit of my stomach threatening to emerge as vomit in a fit of guilt. Only lately have I stopped justifying his actions, justifying his anger with praises and assumptions that it was merely a one-time thing. Only recently have I removed my remorse and started to wonder if I can truly continue to live in fear of a man who proved himself capable of such aggression. If an apology which seems so shallow is really worth my forgiveness at all. Or if perhaps, I should end things the way they would have if I had never looked back.

It was Valentines day. There are places ones mind should be at on such an occasion; still your distraction was impossible to avoid. I miss you, you know? I miss you more now than I did before and still I wonder if my reasons are honest or if I miss you for something less genuine. I won’t know. I feel for you now in ways I neglected to feel for you prior to the news. I feel for you with my soul and with my body as if the evidence of your crime is embedded in me, silent and inactive. Waiting only to emerge when I finally feel okay. I worry that you never had the chance to feel okay. I wonder more if ever you even could have. I know that this couldn’t have been the only time, it never only happens once.  I wish you would have shared your story, too often do they go untold. But perhaps you felt the way I feel, that silence is the sweetest remedy. Perhaps your words could have saved you. Perhaps they would have destroyed you sooner.

They say that time heals all wounds, but I know better.

My mother told me she was going somewhere beautiful. Somewhere where nobody was ever sad, where it never rained and where you could play games all day and you never get sent to your room. She told me that where she was going she would never have to take baths, even if she spent all day jumping in mud puddles. And all the cakes were chocolate with chocolate icing. It was a place where nobody ever got sick and the days never ended too soon. She told me that where she was going she could dance for hours and her feet would never get sore. My mom told me she was going to a place where everyone was always smiling, and kitties stayed cute and cuddly forever. She promised me it was always summer there and she could spend all day at the beach making mud pies and sand castles. And when I asked if she would miss me she said she’d always be near. But I haven’t seen her since Saturday and I’m starting to worry she’s gotten lost. So I’m packing up all my toys in my backpack and I’m going to look for Heaven.

I looked through every photograph of you today. I stared until my eyes grew red and sore. And I missed you, but I’m with you (I am with you aren’t I?). I saw you smiling, and I wondered what she made you feel while you were holding her. Looking at her longingly while she laughed. Looking at her lovingly while she laid her head on your chest. I wonder if your eyes meet me in such a way when I’m not looking. I wonder more if your eyes meet her in such a way when I’m not looking. I can’t stop looking. Photographs showcasing violently, obnoxiously your fingers intertwined. I hated her quietly from behind the screen. Hated her boldness as I hid from the eyes of the world. Just as I hid my eyes from yours last night, as you kissed me on my forehead. And I didn’t believe you. I don’t believe you. How could I believe you? How could I believe you when my monitor is whispering agonizing images of the lips you once kissed. The eyes you once made bleed. And I scrub the makeup from my face to look in the mirror at my uneven complexion. At the pouty lips you just kissed. And at the boring brown eyes that so easily bleed.

I looked through every photograph you have together, and I realized instantly that I am no better. I just came after.

I’m alone today, just as I have been on this day for the past four years. Perhaps I will be alone on this day for the rest of my life. Perhaps by chance I will die on this day. Perhaps a terrible tragedy will bring me to my death on a future September 23rd. Perhaps it won’t be a tragedy at all. Perhaps these revisiting memories of this day will haunt me until my very last breath. Or even perhaps, come another anniversary, I will finally find myself alive.

All I can do is hope for the latter.

     I sat down in my living room this morning, while the house was quiet and hollow and I thought of all the things you’ve done to hurt me. The way a single action could haunt my entire life, and what I thought would kill me once has returned countless times to steal the breath from my lungs. The tears seem to come from a bottomless well. A well where the walls are slippery, coated thickly with slime and mold. And I am drowning. Trying constantly to dig my fingers into the cracks between the cement blocks so I can climb to the surface and breathe. Every time I find a foothold I slip. I’ve been drowning for four years in this bleak, dank jail cell. Four years and still I bleed. The water rosy from my estranged wounds, untreated they will drain until all the water is gone and I lay, nothing but a vacuous carcass in a pool of purple blood.