Deadbeat

“I could not tell you if I loved you the first moment I saw you, or if it was the second or third or fourth. But I remember the first moment I looked at you walking toward me and realized that somehow the rest of the world seemed to vanish when I was with you.”

I wanted to write down exactly what I felt but somehow the paper stayed empty … And I could not have described it any better.

You see, it takes 960 pounds of pressure to break a human sternum, those ivory bones designed to protect slowly fracture and flake into dust like ashes falling from menthol cigarettes. But there was no scale to measure the weight of every apology that flew off your lips like embers popping off a bonfire each time you walked away. There was no conversion table for how many excuses make up a pair of weakened lungs or how many unfinished promises it takes to dim the light in even the brightest set of eyes. Your words rest like anvils on my chest and in the intervals between your sentences and my silence, I finally understand just how heavy some conversations can be and I wonder if you too can hear the snapping and cracking of my ribs.

I was like a patient who cannot tell the doctor where it hurts, only that it does.

And I knew it. That’s the worst part: I knew it.