I damn that word

Psychological research evidences that it takes 15 months and 27 days to forget a person you believe was a love of your life. I’ve been in the same place for 11 years and let me tell you it’s a lie.

You don’t forget a thing.

The void is excruciating. I’m not so sure anymore if it’s admirable the way you discard and disconnect. I think it’s a beautiful kind of cruelty. Really, how light it is. Just. let. Go.

Endings I know look differently depending on which side of the break up you’re on. It must look like relief to you. For me, it’s a call for rescue. My lifejacket is deflated, the lifebuoy too far out at sea, and I have, through a marvellous stroke of terrible luck, found a sinkhole in this ocean.

Being left is not a one time thing. You don’t just leave it at a place in the past and move away from it. It happens to you over and over again. Each time my phone rings and it’s anyone else but you. Each time my phone sits like a dead thing and makes no sound because you don’t speak to me anymore. Or when the songs play, and it makes me want to dissolve. I am abandoned over and over again by things that don’t even know I exist.

I mourn what could have been, what will now not be, and for what I could not save.

The thought revisits each day: you can just reach out. Just reach out. But I don’t think I can. Not without it being a final act of self sabotage. Again and again it comes to me that loving you and staying in love with you is like dying. I understand it. Because truly, there are parts of me there are completely finished and others which have necrotised to point where I know it’s just a matter of time. I am dumbstruck and still in love and very alone. I think I will die like this.

My God. Listen. Tell me it is not long now. A lifetime of clinging and needing. Of begging. And then hearing the gurus tell you that’s not what love looks like. Pretending is exhausting. Smile on my face, laughing in pictures, making this Herculean effort to act as though you no longer exist to me and then remembering that it is me who no longer exists for you. You have always made it look so easy. Take a bow. I fold.

Every few days my body asks for permission to collapse, and my mind begs me to let out some air so that I may be able to remember what it is to breathe. I can’t remember the last time I could fill my chest. Seventy-five days days now I’ve lived like a caught fish convulsing on a riverbank. But when I try to fill my lungs with air, they fill with salt water. I am choking on the words I can no longer say to you. I’m choking on the silence. No, I never got used to it.

You said those days were over. You told me leaving me was no longer an option. I was , “unleavable”… What I am is a joke. I almost believed you. Should I feel pity for you that you let go of love so easily? Or should I feel awe? Your ability to leave and stay away overwhelms my ability to love. And so I return to your ending words. The “I love you” I can’t access, locked away from me. “Take care of yourself,” reminds me I’m on my own again and this time shall perhaps stay that way.

This is erasure. No sign of you exists in the places we used to go. No notes, no words, no pictures, no sounds. There is no way out and no way back. I go looking. Of course I do. I am like an old dog, sniffing about looking for some trace of the familiar. But there is no residue, no evidence, no detritus. No movement. You have done an exemplary job of removing every trace of yourself from me in spite of 8000 kilometres between us. This city is dead. Our world has been decimated.

This grief, this grief is a living dying thing. I wish I could sit you down and pull back your hair, break your resolve, and make you see how small our lives are. How short. And foolish, utterly foolish it is to walk away from that which struggles to live without you.