Because of you (but mostly because of me)

The vast nothingness into which I’ve whispered many “I love you”s swallows my sentences whole and promises that they will never be heard by you

No text or call accompanies my long ride home and I wonder if you are sound a sleep, not a single thought of me entering your slumber

It’s twenty five miles on the fifty five freeway that I have to think about how you turn in your sleep. How the muscles in your arms twitch under my resting head as we both fall into a world of our own, as we have done many times before.

But today is different

Today I walked away, thinking that the choice I made was for the best. My world falls apart like a doll made of straw and you’re blaming me for this heartache.

Soon I will conquer the world in my cap and gown and move far away from this place but when I look at you, I see our worlds remain untouched and unsullied by expectations of conventional love.

I am me because you are you and nothing has changed…except for the fact that I am a mountain and I stand between you and a happiness which far exceeds one that you can even see now. I am bend in the river. I am a fallen tree within your path, one that simply needs to be crossed over and left behind.

I’m grasping for your touch but it’s absence is my doing.

I’m waiting for the exhalation of your breath on my neck but it never comes and I know it’s because I made that choice.

But it was all for you, my sweet and I wish you knew that. I wish you knew that every breath I take now carries with it a sliver of my pain. A hopeful messenger that wishes to share it’s worries and aches with you.

I am a song without lyrics.

I am a wind without the chill.

I am a bed without warmth.

And it’s all because of you….but mostly because of me.

The Red Avion

My heart is a caged bird tormented by the way I have it beat, its wing furiously tearing at my lungs, when I think of when you hurt me. My heart stays in a quiet confinement within my bony cage.

Say those words, any word at all, and unlock such a magnanimous and beautiful creature from its solitary confinement for the bird knows nothing of the brain.

I shout and scream that I will never hear those words but the bird is deaf to my cries, only wishing to be free.

With every quickening beat sweet air is stolen from my own lungs and tears I choke back seem to bathe my soft, burning cheeks. The heat seems to battle against my will to keep these tears chained…along with the bird.

With every furious beat I clench and tighten and take arms against the rebellious avion that only personifies the torment in my heart.

I feel them…a million pieces begin to separate inside me as the bird begins to break free of its chains and I collapse in a heap of them.

Me. Of skin and bone and everything else inside me leaves in a million different directions.

Please God give me the strength to tame the pet I once knew how to subdue with the slow intake of breath and his sweet kiss.

My own body, torn apart in defiance and, although I am mad of a million pieces (and no longer within one skin), I still think of your words.

Hopelessly.

Desperately.

A glance toward the heavens at the moment of that very last tear, a red winged creature is stunned into stillness in mid-air. Softly it falls from grace and I know it to be the end of my own, once passionate heart.

Running. Falling. Bending. Clutching its wing and feeling broken bones, shattered by it’s mighty struggle

To learn the art of repair will take until the closest sun…because we have done this every night. I have been broken. I have been mended. I have been tormented.

Again

and again

and again.

(Reblogged) I know you don’t watch me walk away

I know you don’t watch me walk away. I know you don’t press your forehead against the double glass to keep me in your sight. There is no straining for that one last look, no time suspended in the final unblinking stare. You don’t stay with me until I am just another city glow fading in to night.

Tonight I have said I don’t want to do this anymore. I have said it in the way a liar can tell a single truth, sudden and surprising. You are asleep, or nearly asleep when I whisper it across the back of your head.

I don’t want to do this anymore. This – laying in your arms in yet another bed of tangled sheets. This staccato relationship, our little parody where the only authentic act is how you fall asleep straight after we fuck. And I know what comes next. I can feel the separation as keenly as if you have already peeled your body from mine, already slid back in to that second skin, the crisp white shirt and pressed pants, so deftly shucked hours before. I feel you walking out the door even as your breath warms my breast and your hand remains heavy between my legs. And I decide that tonight I will be the one to go.

I have held on to you so long that my hands still clench around you. My fingertips try to press in to you one last time, to roll across your skin in a final and heroic effort to prove my identity. But you barely stir as one finger then the next has to release its grip.

I move to the edge of the bed and I tell you I am leaving. I say other things too, they tumble from a wine-thick tongue but in time to come I will only ever remember this. How I say I am leaving and you mumbleI’ll see you soon, and how with your eyes still closed you miss the way I shake my head, no.

I know you don’t get up after I close the door behind me. I know you don’t move to the window to watch me tremble into the night. You are not looking down to see me stumble through cracks of concrete in the heels you removed so carefully over dinner, and you don’t watch as I recede to a grey as cobbled as the street below. With no neon flash of text to say goodnight, no vibrating phone to accompany me home, I know you are already sound asleep.

It is my 35th birthday and I will not cry. One wobbly foot in front of the other on this midnight street, I walk away.

Reblogged: body,remember