Leaving

You left me. I was just a child. I don't even remember being left. You thought with anatomy that wasn't your heart, nor your mind. Twenty-plus years later I still reel from blows you knew you dealt me, you rationalized away for your own happiness. I didn't deserve those consequences, which haunt me day to day to day. And now you see what your deeds have done, brokenness. Women who cling to the first affections thrown to them, who don't know what exactly it is to love, to be in love, to return love, to speak love, because you did not exemplify it, because you allowed an absence of it. Women who close their hearts like battlestations, impenetrable, impervious.

You would rather subject us to spiteful words, the two of you, playing children as pawns in a game we did not wish to play. In your mind, your actions affect no one but yourself.... and your days of dealing with the aftermath seem to be long past. Don't you realize that we were wrecked before we began? Can't you see that we never had a chance for happily ever after?

--

The knot is there in my stomach. The room is black despite an hour that is not late. I am too ill to eat, but it's not the illness that I am worried about. I feel afraid, alone. Around me, life is moving on, marching on like it has yet to notice that my world has stopped spinning. He doesn't return my calls, allowing me plenty of time and opportunity to leave him desperate messages on his machine. I drive to his place, but the look that crosses his face when he answers the door is not pleasant. Inconvenience. As if my walking out the door and never returning would neither phase him or sadden him. The pit in my stomach is more than a pit, it is a squirming, a fluttering, of new life that feels more like the end of my own. Never has the world felt so real, and yet so unreal, like a rose-colored veil has been lifted and things are more clear than they ever have been.

--

The line of your jaw is hard and clenching. You dare someone to say the wrong thing, to tell you you're not right. You're dressed in clothes that are aimed to subtract a decade from your age, but all it succeeds in doing is serving a painful reminder that all is not right in the world. I see him sitting next to you, painted smiles and hollow eyes. He is trying to be the person you wanted a long time ago, but you no longer want that person and have decided another will do just fine. Yours is a hurried and careless version of the status quo, though there are cracks forming at the foundation. I am waiting for the pieces to crumble down and take the rest of us with them.