Thinking About You
It’s an exercise is masochism to still care about you so much, still miss you so much I can’t even begin to define the ache that only your touch will heal. But most of the time, I don‘t care how much pain it causes, because I never want to stop missing you. Your eyes saw something in me I will never be able to see on my own, and in you, I saw everything I now know is love. I saw what it was like to be complete, and for that I can never forget your face.
It doesn’t make it hurt less to dwell on things we can’t change, but I’m still asking the cursed words ‘what if?’ as I run each fight through my head like the poison-blood coursing through my veins even now. Every spiteful word we flung in each others’ faces, aiming to wound with the barbed arrows of fury we loosed at one another in our anger. I know how hard it is to lose someone so important it feels like they’re taking your soul with them as they walk away.
I had never noticed how beautiful people look when they’re leaving. It’s strange, I don’t remember any anger or shock, just a sharp, poignant beauty as you turned away, those bright tears in your eyes, the precise moment my whole world stopped. I wasn’t breathing or thinking or caring, just existing in a fog, and it’s been that way ever since. If just for a moment I could take a breath without your presence hovering over me, constricting my lungs, making my food turn to chalk in my mouth. I hate you for never really leaving like you said you would. You’re still around me; in my hair, my clothes, clouding all my memories and thoughts. I live and breath you. You said love was like a dream, so why can’t I seem to wake up?
These days, you’re the only company I have left.
I’ve been lying here since I woke up this morning, flat on my back, staring listlessly up at the ceiling, my head tilted back to view with finality my lonely life.
When I got up and went into the kitchen this morning, all I could think about was how you would have been there, up making breakfast at the crack of dawn, you’re eyes shining in the morning’s ethereal way of showing us the beauty that is masked in the daylight. Not that your beauty was ever anything but apparent. It radiated from every pore like the lust for living you showed me in your embrace.
Hell must be better than wherever I am now, because missing you is tearing me apart. I remember the conversations we used to have every morning, your face alive with conviction in the subject, no matter what it was, hands gesturing wildly, spilling your coffee all over the table. Later, you would come up behind me, wrap your arms around my shoulders and start singing in your beautifully lilting accent, face buried in my shower-damp hair, lips moving softly into my messy curls. When I would inevitably turn around, your eyes would be closed, and you looked so irresistible that it never failed to earn you a lingering coffee-flavoured kiss.
I got so used to it that when you left, I just wondered around the house in a daze, picking up random things we’d always shared. No tears came, not that day, or the next. They still burn my eyes, like they’re waiting for a wall to break loose inside me, and then the flood will come. The truth is, I’m afraid to cry. I’m afraid that if I start, I’ll never be able to stop.
Something inside snapped when you turned your back on me after that last devastating fight. Something inside of me forgot how to exist. It just died, abandoned me, and now I have nothing to show for all the love I spent with such desperate freedom, all for the promise in your eyes.