Why didn't I see this day coming? I knew in my heart as you stood there that day so many years ago, so smug as you outlined all the things he was that I was not, I knew that you were going with him to spite me, to spite yourself, to spite us really.
Your guilt had been building for weeks, you stood there with that albatross, looking strangely like a little girl in your mother's party dress. You stood there facing down a future doomed to the path of least resistance. I knew the challenge was too great for you, my uncertainty burned like vinegar in my throat and my fear was palpable. I had most recently realized the mortality of my body, and that of my soul.
You had just discovered the strength of your wings and were bound to roam to the extents of your newly defined world. I didn't stand a chance to entertain you in that state, I could feel the pull of the open road on your heart. Though pesky reminders of your beauty and vivacity refused to travel, instead clinging to me like an aroma of some faintly recognizable flower, it was hardly a fair trade for the sizable piece of my heart I soon learned was tethered fast to my reality of you.
The phone calls were a poor replacement for the way your head felt cradled in the hollow of my neck, my sentiments were obviously distastefully perceived by you. Your silence, my frustration quickly thereafter surmised, was even less appealing though proved more difficult, nay impossible for me to alter.
The first few weeks I pretended the end hadn't come, that my utter frustration with our separation wasn't such a source of contention as to cause you to elude me distinctly. As the time dragged by that first year I invented ways this treatment was deserved, I graphed the ways this fault rested with me, I charted alternatives, I plotted and story-boarded these out to their successful conclusions.
For the first few months of the second year I alternated between imagining your face in crowds to analyzing our last words to determine what end of the earth I had actually lost you to in order to develop the plan to search for your trail, knowing at the end of that trail I would find you~Broken hearted, dejected at the realization you couldn't capture the happiness you had experienced with me again in him.
For the remainder of the second year I told myself I'd come to grips with your decision and that I wouldn't delude myself with these childish dreams of your return while masturbating to the fantasy of your displeasure with the choice you had made. I quit my job and moved out of the old place, disconnecting that phone number made me cry. It's symbolism as the last means of your communicating with me was obvious. The day it was officially off, I drove by your parents' house twice.
Throughout the third year I woke up every day and told myself that was the day I wouldn't think about you, realizing every time that I had just done so. I started back to school, telling myself I had no reason whatsoever to believe you were not obviously living as happy a life as this world can provide and learned to say, I wish her the best. Deciding to say it was enough this year, I procrastinated on meaning it.
It was during this year that I wrote a short story about driving around the ghetto in search, my professor rather enjoyed the character sketches of the nymph named Shelley and suggested I draw this character out further. I complied and put together a collection of short essays detailing her relationship too hideous to describe but so lustful in the telling I was not to be deterred with morals and values but instead puked the story out onto the pages before me like oil running over the water. My guilt and my heartbreak fought for prominence, my soul was barred and my anguish was detailed.
During the fourth year I broke down and tied the knot to the next love in my life, the girl that hung my moon and pulled me out of the funk that was me. I was still a wreck but I was a wreck long before I knew you, that wasn't your doing. I was past the dull ache and loneliness that had plagued me for so long after your departure, I was over the what-ifs and could-bes that had haunted me from the first steps I took in your absence, I was confident, I was educated, I had my whole life in front of me. I had nothing but the world on a plate and the view was grand.
Now through all of this I had developed quite a dependence on mood-altering chemicals, party-scenes, and my computer. I lived like a madman partying for days and then digging into my little office and typing out the darkest secrets of my soul convincing my self that the process was cathartic, and the output was art. I went without sleep for days and weeks, I imagined little green men to provide feedback to my questions of method and craft, I had a spirit guide much of the time who took various forms such as people and animals that I'd known or admired. He told me the truth when no one else would, I told him my truths and he did not judge, he was never real in any sense of the word but I managed to hear his conversations with me as if he were a living being in the same room with me most any time day or night. He told me when I came across a repressed thought that was important to my well-being and recovery from the quagmire that I placed myself in, he breathed words of caution into my brain when I let my self-destructive bent take too much control of my automaton reflexes, he captured for me all of the lost bits of thought and intuition and gave them back to me in cohesive sentences and concepts, he saved me from the destiny I tried to choose for myself.
I found myself alone with him on many occasions as I attempted suicide in one form or another, he managed to stifle every attempt. I found myself looking up to him, looking for the strength that he possessed and for some way to usurp this from him. Use it to my own benefit, use it for my own means and ends. He knew all along my motivation, and he watched amused as I searched for his weakness, for his one shortcoming that I could exploit, I knew it was there, and I knew when I found the opportunity I would fuck it in the ass like a ten-dollar whore and ride it until I had extracted it's secret power or squeezed all of its usefulness into my veins and it ran through my body like a fresh smack high. He chuckled inside at my delusional goals, he laughed to spite me as I raked the carpets with my fingers seeking that one last kernel that continued to elude me, he pitied me but he never let me know it, he treasured me for what I illustrated to him as the alternative.
He was my sanity, and he was slipping away as I plotted against him.
Through it all there was the memories that I couldn't look through, the past that I kept hidden behind the curtains never to be seen unless the wind blew just right and brought to me a scent or a sound of what once was. Sporadically and unexpected these bits of the past blew through my existence and stunned me like a blow to the nose.
