6 years. That's the last time I saw you pulling away in your car and I cried because I'd ended my first real relationship with my best friend, but it was better for me. I knew what you were and I knew what I was becoming.
I couldn't follow you down that path. I tried. It wasn't me. I couldn't be in an open relationship. I care too deeply, too much, too possessive, some might say. Is it wrong to expect your boyfriend to remain faithful? To only touch you, who had never denied him? Everything you asked, I did; so much more than I was willing to do. Unwillingly, I knew you.
Unwillingly, I left you. I had defined myself by what I meant to you, years of calling myself yours and identifying myself by the fingerprints you left on my skin, your breath in my hair, the blood on my neck. I kept myself alive for you. We shattered -no breaking- a powder keg, a grapeshot fired into tender flesh, bone confetti dusting the grass like snow, so over, there would never be a zombie of this relationship to shamble back.
You destroyed me, my better self, stole my soul and threaded it through your chest hair, close to the heart that never beat. You drove away to her. I cried and disposed of what I forgot to give you. I sent a letter, a cease and desist. We could never speak. I thought you honored that.
3 years. That's when you sent me a message that tore my heart out. You asked how I was, what was up. Had you changed? It didn't matter. You never apologized. We have nothing to say. We know each other, had wiped the slate clean, and there is nothing to say, no letters that fit together or words that make sentences. When you know everything, there is no mystery.
You asked if I meant the cease and desist. I did.
Today. You followed me. Stop. Why toy with me? What could we possibly say to each other that would mean anything? My body seized up, like a released spring, all tight metal still hot from kinetic energy. It is quick to remind me of past pain, like I'm allergic to you. I block, I remove all thought, all trace, of you. Because if I can't see you, you can't see me.
I write to erase the ache, to ease the stress I feel just thinking about you and what you did. I don't know what you've done with your life; I've carefully refrained from checking up on you, content in the idea that your happiness does not depend on me knowing about it and vice versa. I supposed you to be in a new life, one where I had never existed. I talked about you to new friends who never knew your name as if you were a caricature of a real person, a mosquito made human, a louse with a mouth. They laughed as I regaled your abuses in comedic fashion, "Isn't it hilarious how I paid him so he wouldn't feel bad after the break up? I know, he cheated on me with 6 other girls, I don't know how I stayed with him either." So funny, the pains of yesterday. How easily they come when there's no immediate threat. The delivery says everything about the story.
And you're in the past, the ghost of bad Mexican food resurfacing all these years later.
What would I say? Thank you for being a jerk, you made it easier to let go? I learned how to be independent by reminding myself that a relationship could go so incredibly wrong? I prevented interest because I couldn't fathom attraction to another male, let alone a functional one?
Once we considered binding ourselves in sickness and in health... I submit a simple reversal of the sentiments in that we repel each other in life, til Death do us meet.
Believe every word of this last sentence, for I mean it sincerely and in no other circumstance: I'll see you on the other side.
I couldn't follow you down that path. I tried. It wasn't me. I couldn't be in an open relationship. I care too deeply, too much, too possessive, some might say. Is it wrong to expect your boyfriend to remain faithful? To only touch you, who had never denied him? Everything you asked, I did; so much more than I was willing to do. Unwillingly, I knew you.
Unwillingly, I left you. I had defined myself by what I meant to you, years of calling myself yours and identifying myself by the fingerprints you left on my skin, your breath in my hair, the blood on my neck. I kept myself alive for you. We shattered -no breaking- a powder keg, a grapeshot fired into tender flesh, bone confetti dusting the grass like snow, so over, there would never be a zombie of this relationship to shamble back.
You destroyed me, my better self, stole my soul and threaded it through your chest hair, close to the heart that never beat. You drove away to her. I cried and disposed of what I forgot to give you. I sent a letter, a cease and desist. We could never speak. I thought you honored that.
3 years. That's when you sent me a message that tore my heart out. You asked how I was, what was up. Had you changed? It didn't matter. You never apologized. We have nothing to say. We know each other, had wiped the slate clean, and there is nothing to say, no letters that fit together or words that make sentences. When you know everything, there is no mystery.
You asked if I meant the cease and desist. I did.
Today. You followed me. Stop. Why toy with me? What could we possibly say to each other that would mean anything? My body seized up, like a released spring, all tight metal still hot from kinetic energy. It is quick to remind me of past pain, like I'm allergic to you. I block, I remove all thought, all trace, of you. Because if I can't see you, you can't see me.
I write to erase the ache, to ease the stress I feel just thinking about you and what you did. I don't know what you've done with your life; I've carefully refrained from checking up on you, content in the idea that your happiness does not depend on me knowing about it and vice versa. I supposed you to be in a new life, one where I had never existed. I talked about you to new friends who never knew your name as if you were a caricature of a real person, a mosquito made human, a louse with a mouth. They laughed as I regaled your abuses in comedic fashion, "Isn't it hilarious how I paid him so he wouldn't feel bad after the break up? I know, he cheated on me with 6 other girls, I don't know how I stayed with him either." So funny, the pains of yesterday. How easily they come when there's no immediate threat. The delivery says everything about the story.
And you're in the past, the ghost of bad Mexican food resurfacing all these years later.
What would I say? Thank you for being a jerk, you made it easier to let go? I learned how to be independent by reminding myself that a relationship could go so incredibly wrong? I prevented interest because I couldn't fathom attraction to another male, let alone a functional one?
Once we considered binding ourselves in sickness and in health... I submit a simple reversal of the sentiments in that we repel each other in life, til Death do us meet.
Believe every word of this last sentence, for I mean it sincerely and in no other circumstance: I'll see you on the other side.
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