it's 2 AM. you're sitting on the floor of your kitchen wearing the last shirt that still carries his smell. there's an empty ben and jerry's next to you, mascara smudged down your face and stained in your finger's prints.
anything, i'd do anything for this pain to simply subside. i just want
this pain to go away. please.
when we have this pain laid heavily our hands, especially when it's all that's left of our relationship, we say we want it to dissipate, but i don't think we do. i think we're lying to ourselves. if we really wanted the pain to go away, we'd erase his voicemail, throw out the tshirt, delete all the text messages, hide the journal punctuated with his name. we'd avoid every sappy love song and every break up song. his name would fade a little with every action, every step in the direction away from the failure of that relationship.
but this isn't what we do.
we sit in his tshirt. we say his name over and over again between midnight sobs. we reread and reread and reread every last text. we listen to the voicemail with shaking hands and a shattering heart. we listen to the songs we sang in the car with him.
saying these things hurt doesn't even begin to explain it.
it's like your heart is on steroids and you can feel it pumping 24/7,
like your whole body is pumping with the loss of him.
it's like someone put magic contacts in your eyes, and you see his face, his smile, his essence everywhere, reminding you of all you lost.
imagine pouring lead into your veins; it's that kind of weight.
it's like someone took a highlighter to your life and is illuminating for you in the brightest yellow all the times he would have been there, as if you didn't already know.
if you've ever seen an apple dipped in liquid nitrogen and thrown on the ground, shattering into a trillion pieces, that is a very good visual for how this feels.
i think we hold onto pain so tightly because it validates our relationship, friendship, experience, or whatever it was that has caused it. everything in you hurts because it happened; it wasn't in our heads or our fantasy or our dream.
it was real.
but it's over now. the good memories, the good days, the good hugs, the good smiles, are fading more and more with every breath. our pain is all we have. we aren't over that relationship yet; we don't want to, we can't say goodbye to that person or the end to the story.
we try to battle the inevitable fade. we grasp tightly onto the pain. we aren't going to feel loved or made special or pursued by that person anymore, all that's left is pain. all we have left of him is pain. so we take what we can get - or rather - what we've been given.