Sleepless

I’m tired, yet I cannot sleep. For when I do, your image lines the walls of my imagination. I endure long nights with the echoes of your words reverberating in such a melodic way, that they slowly merge into one harmonic sound that almost sends me to sleep, but not quite. I simply teeter on the edge of unconsciousness so precariously, that I shake myself awake at the very threat of falling into it. How long must this go on, I cry into the darkness. How long have we been dancing in the dark to the tune we now regret creating.

You say it’s over, you’re done, you wish to be alone, yet when I stoically accept your choice, turn to leave, you change your mind, reach out, say you love me more than before. Say we broke it to mend it. Make love to me in the bed that was moments before the scene of a crime, committed to our union. I feel silently relieved, but suddenly confused. Should love be this fickle? Should love be so conflicting?

We rinse and repeat, over and over and over again. With my reaction getting weaker every time, ‘til I’m wailing and begging you to stay. ‘I can’t leave you when you’re strong, show me your strength!’ You demand, as I’m lying on the floor, brow beaten from your digs and jibes that reduce me to nothing. Is this a test? Is love meant to be so gruelling?

Each time we think the last time is the last time, until we make love, smooth over the cracks and carry on as if this behaviour is normal. Our normal. And everyone thinks we’re mad. Yet we don’t seem to care. Until we do. Until you write words that I read and can’t unread and I say things about my past love you can’t bear to hear. I turn miserable and you turn cold and the love making turns to something else completely. Something jagged and cruel. Something that leaves me feeling chewed up and spat out. Is love meant to be so brittle? Is love meant to be so bruised?

Lost, I don’t walk away, I run, with you sending emails in my wake. Telling me you’ll always love me, but wish me luck. You saying I’m magic, yet not asking for me back. I reply with heartache I can’t conceal. We spend months on the phone every day. Me telling you my regrets. You telling me you’re not with anyone else. Me getting hurt when you go do the things we were meant to do together. You getting hurt when someone walks into my life, so I turn them around and walk them back out. Keep the door open for you, on the basis that you drip feed me just enough to encourage it. Until I finally ask you to step through and you reply with indignation. You wish to be alone! Had I forgotten?! Had I misread the signs that had been covered by the fog your indecision?

We fight like lovers, talk like friends, hold on to one another as though our very last breath depended on it. I say I love you and you reply the same, yet draw a trench in the sand deep enough to act as burial space for the pair of us. You verbally lay our love to rest, yet actively swim in it. Kill it, yet give life to it. Hold onto the ashes, whilst speaking your prayers. I cannot tell which way to turn, for every direction leads me back to you. Back to a time when I let myself float in your waters. Saw your soul through the colour of your eyes. Was held in your calloused hands. And called it love. And life. When I gave myself to you as though it was the only thing I had to do that day. And maybe it was. Maybe it was all I wanted. You.

But you wanted me to want more. Because you did. You wanted mountain tops, when I was offering you the range. You wanted the spotlight, when I was offering you a home. You wanted the material, when I was offering you the ethereal. We’re just different you and I. That’s why we push and pull. That’s why we intrigue one another, whilst getting annoyed, all at the same time. That’s why it hurts. Because the love’s there, but it lays in the middle ground we can never find. Our contentment eluding us, tauntingly so. We sense its presence, yet have never quite been able to grasp onto it long enough to truly believe it exists.

So now I lay awake in the darkness, with your words softly repeating in my mind, matched with the vision of that look upon your face, when you held me in the water, as I panicked and flailed. It was the look of somebody who’d suddenly fallen in love and given in to a moment, that would soon pass and be lost to many more that weren’t as beautiful. I still question when it will end. When sleep will return and bring dreams of someone else. Someone new. Until then, I lay drowsily thinking of you.

Strong Love

I bend and break to the will of their demands, simply because I am so afraid that if I say no, they will leave me.

I glance in the mirror only to see sadness, yet know I am the only one who placed its presence upon my face. I am better than this, I tell myself, as I sob silently behind closed doors.

How did we get here, I ask myself for the hundredth time this year. How did the one before and the one before that not teach us what it was to be brave. To be alone.

I see the pictures, the replicas of our time spent together. The setup stands the same, but I have to focus my eyes a little to see that it is not my own figure that stands beside him now. It is another version of myself. A little younger. A little prettier. I have to steady my nerves, quell the gathering of tears that sit behind my now closed eyes. The ones that wish they could erase those images and the imaginary ones that they invoke. Of him and her playing out the roles that were once ours. Unwrapping the dreams that once belonged to us. The ones we would speak about in lengthy conversations that bled into the night.

It’s over, I say. Our time is done. The waiting, the constant waiting, for his return, has finally come to an end.

I try not to feel as though my heart might stop at any moment. That I did not waste four years to loving an illusion of a man who could never be all that he professed he might one day become. I try to accept it as the blessing wrapped in a jagged lesson that it was. He was my heart opener. He was my core work.

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Here we are again

I have calloused hands from holding on too tight. A death grip around your heart, trying to keep it in my possession, knowing only too well that I am fighting a losing battle. I push you away with my concerns. Turn you off with my anxiety.

How did we get here, again?

I feel good on my own. I orbit my own contentedness. I become so self-absorbed that the presence of others becomes insignificant. It’s just me and my own mind. Floating aimlessly in ignorant bliss. But that’s when it happens. Like a comet crashing into my side, causing a cavity I know I’ll never fill.

I fall into the black hole of obsession. Chasing you like a drug high I wish to endlessly recreate. All those cracks in me expanding until I am simply held together by virtue of my will to stay a little longer by your side. But I can’t, can I. Because it’s too much and then not enough.

I seek answers in your last love and hold myself against her. I know, I know we are not the same. That what I have to offer will be wildly different. That what I have to teach cannot be taught by her. Yet I will still compare and suck the joy from my veins in doing so. I will worry and plant seeds of doubt in you that grow into weeds, poking holes in what we have.

I tell myself that I am better off alone. That I am better without the complication of another person’s galaxy, causing chaos in my own. That I am safer in my own atmosphere. Calmer. And yet, I know it is implausible to maintain the type of solitude that keeps me sane, as these interactions appear unavoidable. Inescapable.

So here we are again. Here I am with you, hoping upon hope that I can do better than the last time. That I can learn. That I can let this go when the time comes and not force it out the door like I usually do. Not run from it, as though it were a fire I lit, which spread through every room in my once loved home.

I will try to trust until you reveal to me that I was right to worry. I will try until you tell me that there’s nothing left to try for. I will unclench my hands from your heart and release you to stay or go, depending on your thoughts that day. I will accept that maybe the lessons I have to teach you are not the ones you wish to learn. I will stand here in the dark, until you turn the light on and show me that you’ve gone home.