A Piece of Me

I could feel the sun gently lay the full force of its touch across my skin. The fine hairs on my arms reach out for it like the longing arms of a loved one receiving a loved one after, what had seemed like, a lifetime had ticked away between the in-betweens of their hollow heartbeats. Not hollowed by a lack of love but in fact just the opposite. Absence makes the heart grow fonder they say. Well absence makes my heart ache. And now your presence makes my head hurt because, as I lay here with you in my arms while we both lay in the arms of the sun, gently caressed by the glancing blow of the earths cool breath it occurs to me that…this doesn’t feel right anymore.

I inhale. You smell like coconut. And cherries. Shampoo and lip-gloss. And you smell like you. That’s as best as I can explain it because I know no other smell like you, with which I could make a comparison.
I peak down the bridge of my nose to glimpse your head as it rests atop my heart, gently being pushed away and pulled back in by the rise and fall of my ribcage. I ask you what you’re thinking…I don’t even know why. I think I am trying to trick myself into not thinking about the realisation I so inconveniently stumbled across. You know like that moment when you’re sat on a train and you catch a glimpse of someone you know but do not want to recognise you, so you quickly turn your head away and maybe even shuffle your body somewhere out of their line of sight but in that moment you realise all these sudden movements are just drawing attention to you so you abruptly stop and hold yourself in a position that isn’t even remotely comfortable, becoming some unwilling participant in a silent game of musical statues. All the while you sit there, betwixt Medusa’s gaze and whisper to yourself “please don’t see me, don’t look, don’t notice me” as if that will make you invisible. And then they call your name or worst still, they have actually gotten up and walked over to you. None of this really has anything to do with anything…my mind has a tendency to dance away with itself in a glorious waltz of seemingly unrelenting vigour. The point is, though I lay there with you in that moment, my mind was chasing some iota of hope that what I felt – or didn’t feel – was merely a glitch in the matrix.
I wonder if you can feel my heart beating. I wonder why it no longer beats for you. Had we simply run our course? Do people really just suddenly stop feeling in that way? Or is it more likely that this has been a progressive deterioration that I either failed to realise or convinced myself was not happening? You know how we have that bad habit of only seeing what we want to see?
This whole thing is making me feel sick. I shuffle my body beneath you, trying to find some remnants of comfort. I know full well that won’t work because the source of discomfort is not external or even physiological, but I swear if I stay here I might just implode. Or cry. Because this realisation has taken me by the hand and led me down a dirt road, littered with the rubble and scattered debris of everything you and I had been dreaming of. Smiles shared and multiplied, families grown and melded; a future that has become history before even breathing a breath in the present, now locked away in chrysalis without any hope of breaking free. Just some odd time capsule that has been buried in the ether, weighing nothing at all but likely being a burden even Atlas would find hard to shrug.

What is wrong with me? How did we get here?
Coconut. Cherries. You. Each aroma enters my nostrils and almost rustles through my soul as you sit up and look down at me. You ask me where I went. Evidently that waltz took me away for some period of time. I look up at you; a sunlight halo crowns your head and trickles through your hair. Some words stumble from my mouth and perhaps my mouth alone because I do not think they made any sense at all. Whatever I said has completely yanked the smile off of your face and replaced it with an expression of confusion.
Did I speak from my mouth on behalf of my heart? Did I just tell you the vicious truth without even meaning to; unwillingly or unintentionally delivering the scything pulse that radiates through our entire being when the silent sound of our shattering heart screams a cry so vehement and violent that it shakes the very core of Mt. Olympus and steals the air from Aphrodite’s lungs.
Have I just participated in Karma’s balancing act? Unconscious vengeance for pain you once shunted into my life. Or am I just trying to justify the fact that I do not love you anymore because, even though I know it is the best thing for me, I do not want to be away from you. At least, the heart in my mind tells me that I should not want to. I don’t know if that even makes sense…but I know now that I let go of the wrong thing. I should have let go of my fear and the shackles I had placed on myself, holding the key in my hands because I was too scared to let go. If I had let go of you then, we wouldn’t have been in this moment right now. Your body wrapped in the glassy embrace my consoling arms as we lay in the grasp of the cold sun and your heart rains free from your eyes.
I try to find the words to tell you that I am sorry. That I never wanted to hurt you and I would take it all back if only I could. But what do those words mean? Do they even register in the cardiovascular cochlea of an equilibrium disrupted by functional dysfunction? I doubt it. But I am sorry. And I give you that piece of me though I wish I didn’t have to while hoping you know that a piece of me will always belong to you…but I have to go. I have to let go of the right thing this time.

This isn’t a story of how messed up love can be or how things seldom seem to go the way you want them to. It isn’t even intended to make you feel anything for either person but to remind you that sometimes, the thing you are holding on to is actually the very thing from which you need liberation.

Don’t be afraid to let go. Sometimes, it is the best thing you could possibly do.

Sad, but true.

Jack.