lunula

- remembering how easy it was for you to stop loving me

- wondering if it was so easy because i am so difficult

- reading passages comparing your feelings for her to your feelings for me

- being described as a last resort in those very same passages

- feeling like nothing more than a last resort

- feeling like nothing

- forgiving you for it

you told me you wanted to discuss it and, when we did, you told me you didn’t want me to “get hurt.” you told me you were “worried” i was investing, emotionally and mentally, in a relationship with you which might never happen. you didn’t tell me it was beautifully written. you didn’t tell me you loved, or even liked, to read the things i wrote. 

many, many times I had watched you make those exact motions, in varied attire and various college rooms. there was a time - a few in fact - when you were wearing nothing more than your boxers, ironing the very clothes you would later dance in. i remember watching you, much the same as i did now, sipping a glass of wine and singing breathily along with the music that played. it was a scene of domestic bliss and, at that time, i felt certain i would be living it and reliving it for years to come. 

i never thought laundry would be able to make my heart constrict the way it did then. it’s a funny thing, nostalgia, soft and yet hard. a tender ache where my heart used to be. a space once so full of love, i felt like it could explode out of me at any moment. 

i tried to describe it to you more than once, the cosmic event occurring inside the cage of my ribs every time your sleeping head found its way to my shoulder; and every time my wandering fingers found a home in your hair. it’s a story i told on the pages of my diary year after year and a story i told on drunken nights in with my friends. and here i am, telling the same story again.

that space, once so full of love, now lies deserted. cracks grow up the walls like ivy. but wait! did you see that? something stirred. look! there! beyond the atrium. did you see it?

i wrote T a letter about the possibility of us getting back together someday. he was surprisingly receptive to it, and agreed to discuss it with me. long story short, we concluded that, while it was a nice idea, nothing could really happen before he moved out in July. what would we even change? 

at the time, I felt somewhat dissatisfied with this. I guess, despite my low expectations, I was still hoping for some great upheaval, some huge turnaround. excitement! adventure! love! but, of course, I got none of that and, despite having been realistic about it, I still felt disappointed. 

perhaps it is the ennui of illness, but i miss him. i miss being in love with him and i miss his being in love with me. i want him to hold me like he’s got the whole world inside his hands. i want him to stroke my hair and tell me how much he loves me, how, before he met me, he believed he was a sociopath. i don’t want him to look away. i don’t want him to ever look away.

but, and i know this with great certainty, you’d never ask. you’d never have the courage. no matter what happened, no matter the depths of your regret or the heights of love, you’d never have the courage. you have always been very good at accepting your circumstances. you do not fight them.