life liminal

...one minute before I vainly wish that this life I'm living just be a dream nightmare from which I am only moments away from waking. You are asleep on the floor downstairs; you've been asleep there for a while, breathing softly with your feet propped on the couch while your head rests on the floor next to the puzzle we didn't finish. My cats are curled up at your feet; they know I love you, and they love you too. All is calm; the fish tank gurgles and drips lightly, the TV plays at an almost imperceptible volume set by me for you to sleep undisturbed . My pen scratches this page upstairs. Around me everything is still–within me a maelstrom rages.

I feel like I've lost you. And I don't know what to do. I wish I had known this was a battle I would eventually be fighting; or perhaps this was happening all the while, a long slow burn gone unnoticed until the fire raged out of control. Could I have done things different? Would anything have changed where we now are? Would it even matter anyway?

When I think of you... how much I love you... When I see your face – your beautiful eyes so dark and strong, the smooth curve of the softest cheek I've ever held, the mess of hair that tickles my nose when you lay on my chest, the lips that I long for so desperately – my brain falters if not stops altogether. You are in a whole different category of beauty all your own in my mind, made all the more mesmerizing to take into my eyes simply by virtue of being the one I love so much.

I don't know–– No, I don't understand–– Can't comprehend why my life is doing this to me again. I say "again" as if any time before now even counts when compared to you. I don't want this. I can't take it. But just accepting it, the platitudes of "everything will be okay", "time heals all"… It's insane; it WON'T be okay. I WON'T BE OKAY. I'm so tired of hurting that I can't take it anymore. I'm so done with feeling this pain over and over again. And I thought you were going to be the one to fix this with me. But now life seems to just want to take from me again. I just wish I could have one thing. I don't think that's too much to ask. I just want you, you to love me too. It's so unfair… It's cruel… It's senseless and meaningless and fills me with freezing anger and hate at the world.

At myself.

At everything.

But not you.

Because I love you. I love you. I love you. I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU.

I picked you, our paths defied astronomical odds and intersected in this huge crazy world. They began to intertwine with one another for a while. I saw them continuing to run parallel for their entire lengths. Now to think those lines might drift apart and away from one another makes my blood run cold as ice in my veins. It makes a chilling heat rush down my spine. It makes my mouth dry, my lips stick and scrape against one another. My mind rejects it. My heart fights it. My eyes weep for it. My lungs manage only shallow breaths. My thoughts immediately spin– "This can't be happening. I can't do this. No, no, no, no, no! I don't want this. I want you. I need you. I LOVE YOU. Our LIFE together", all these images of a life yet lived immediately conjuring up and compounding the immense pain which itself is only teasing my heart before the true darkness and hurt and loss and alone and fractured-ness that seems to be coming slowly but most certainly toward me. There is one singular other thing so affecting on my psyche and my body: the undeniable certainty of mortality. Correspondingly as one cannot, or perhaps does not want, to "imagine death" I do not want, nor cannot, imagine my life after you've walked out of it.

When I think of your line moving away from mine and disappearing... to not see age take hold slowly and most gracefully across your precious face, transforming you into a grown man–my handsome man, my husband–it makes me quite literally nauseous. To think that someday you could be building a life with someone else and through it all have forgotten about me… To know that eventually one day, one hour, one moment will be the last moment that I ever cross your mind before never returning again… It shatters me. It makes me lower than weak. It is in the simplest sense paralyzing, crippling, makes me feel like a helpless child.

To miss out on seeing you succeed – because I know without a doubt that you will – and never know your aspirations, your gripes, your day-to-day hum-drum and listen to you recount the events of each and every day… I hate it. In my head I see all of these photos of us yet to be taken. Photos of us, and future memories from a wonderful life that we have yet only just begun to live; one by one I feel like they are dissolving away as the certainty of this horrific, seemingly alternate morbid-reality-become-my-life sets in.

Losing you feels like losing myself. It feels like losing my life – or my life force anyway. It feels now as if I am in a never-ending freefall where the ground is not getting any closer. Do you think people falling without parachutes ever wish they never jumped? Or that they wish the ground was closer? Or that they wish they would just keep falling forever and never hit the ground?

It doesn't matter though; none of these are possible and they can only accept–no matter how awful, unfair, brain-breaking, shock-inducing, and whatever else it is–the certainty of it all in the short time they now realize they have. Anything else is simply naïve.

And I, too, feel naïve for continuing to think I will just keep falling. Or that you'll fall back in love with me. It is as plain as day, as easy to see as the sun in the desert, how far you have drifted from me. When I look at you your gaze is empty of the warmth of deep love that I once saw there. When I touch you, my hand on your leg, hoping beyond anything you'll take it once again, it feels like the most one-sided gesture. You withdraw, you freeze. You see it there but do nothing. You don't want it. You don't want me…

And it cuts me so deep. Because I want nothing more than you. Your love. Your embrace. Your good. Your bad. The best and worst in all of it. Anything else I am simply just not interested in. Because it's you. Everything points to you for me.

I just want to be the one for you to whom everything points back.