Twelve Days of Misery

It’s been nine days since she left the country. Twelve since I last beheld the beautiful enigma of her countenance, and tasted the salty tears which stained her cheek. She said she had to go. That we could not continue like this. It wasn’t what either of us wanted. I couldn’t argue, but I only yielded to her disturbing suggestion that we cut each off for four weeks because I believed that she would return to me as she had done before. Many times before. I loved her, so I let her go. The proverb dances through my mind even now like a frivolous fairy: If you love someone, let them go…I love her still but I let her go. She said she loved me, whispered it into my ear in the afterglow, but her words now ring hollow, chiselled out by her actions. The conflict in in her eyes, the contradiction in her voice. She was playing with me. Using me to figure herself out.

I started it as a game but overestimated my ability to subsume my feelings, to divorce the physical from the emotional. I was wrong to think I could fool around. I suck at games. When I fell in love with her, I tumbled into a bottomless chasm. She said she loved me and she opened her heart to me. We filled each other with the bountiful riches of passionate love as we surrendered to the wild affair. We filled each other. We held nothing back. Now she has taken everything away, and I can’t go on. I can’t let her go. I don’t want to let her go.

Bereft of words to accurately capture the pain which has rendered me useless for anything but morbid introspection, I desire a new alphabet to describe the agony of unrequited love and the subsequent oxidation of my heart. I’m sure it will burst any moment now. My head. My heart. My choice to risk everything, to invest so much, has bankrupted my soul.

And yet…I hold on to the hope that when she returns she will ask me to hold her, and never let her go. And I won’t.

written by D.A.Cairns