Wrote this for a friend undergoing through troubled times. Curious realization: the first or last lines of my pieces are almost always the lines I start with.
Shall I not wander there, a shadow’s shade,
A spectre self-destroyed,
So purged of all remembrance and sucked back
Into the primal void,
That should we on that shore phantasmal meet
I should not know the coming of your feet?
- Edith Wharton, An Autumn Sunset
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
She wonders when he’ll become part of the background again.
She dreams of all the wasted years and all the pent-up regrets that she kept in the space where her heartbeats and breaths wrap around each other and she cries a little, dies a little with every passing hour. Where has her love gone? she asks and the gentling grief and stifled and starved devotion, both of which feel the same now, gather behind her tongue, choking back the answers. Can he comprehend how it feels to love and hurt so much that the only recourse is to leave?
They were never perfect, that much she knows, but they were together and that was what mattered then. She wonders how it happens, how two people who should be together get together only to have nothing happen. Should she call it nothing, the destruction of something she thought would last forever? No, not forever, she thinks angrily, only until the end of their days which is nowhere close to forever. A lifetime, then. A lifetime for a life full of hopes and dreams and that one person who can fill all the hollow spaces between her fingers and all the pauses between her breaths and everything she has that are lost and long gone-
Longing comes and bypasses the calling of flesh and settles and rattles in the hollow deep in her bones. Longing that years for a closeness that no amount of contact can ever sate, that ends only when she no longer discerns where his heart ends and hers begin.
Who does she long for now? She blames him for such thoughts, for he professed his devotion when all he meant was a niggle of his heart and a fragment of his time and those were nowhere near enough.
She walks away without so much a goodbye and she wonders, as she knows she will for the rest of her life, if he watched her leave.
Tags: choked and cherished, devotion, goodbyes, longing, needing and wanting, the mistake was the devotion
