I awake to my tired hands holding your body tightly against mine. The smell of you is something I will never forget, pleasantly refreshing almost like a hot shower. It's funny now to think that this moment is the last, the last time I will ever touch you affectionately. The last time I will gaze upon you with an infinite stare so deep that it still shakes me like the first shiver of winter; catching me off guard because I thought summer would never end. I can feel your heart beating against mine and I want to cry, what a terrible feeling to know this was fading and the reasons were all mine to hold. You drift back from your dream and into the daze of the living, you realize where you are and you ask me to drive you home. I get dressed and you do the same. Though we wore little, there was no passionate *** the night before. Just two bodies side by side seeking shelter from the storm that brewed inside of us. This is the end, we can both feel it but neither of us has the tongue to speak it.
I turn the key in the ignition and we idle for a short time in silence, now strangers again living different lives. This driveway in my beat-up Mazda on an early Sunday morning, this place is my purgatory. I make a stop at the gas station, the E-light is on again. I ask you if you need a water or a coffee. You disdainfully say no. You hate me again, you have remembered I am a cheater, worse a liar and no matter how many times I apologize those truths remain evident. On my walk from the car I imagined you hopping in the driver's seat and driving off; if only the tank wasn't empty. I buy you water anyway because though you have declined it, I know that you need it, I always knew what you needed and it wasn't me or at least that's how I felt. I hope those feelings give you a little clairvoyance into my behavior. I never thought I was better than you if anything I thought you made me more. I pay the gas station attendant for pumping the gas, I hand you the bottled water and I drive you home.
My car pulls into the dirt driveway; I keep it running even though I want to turn it off, just shut up that loud lousy engine for a couple of minutes and tell you how much I hate myself for being such a miserable *****. Instead there is an awkward goodbye, do we kiss, do we hug, do we shake hands; I don't ******* know. You open the car door as to leave; possibly forever and you stop. You turn to me and ask a simple question. "Why didn't you do this when we were dating?" you hold up that plastic bottle now half empty "This is all I ever wanted!" I knew what you meant and it had nothing to do with water. I stutter for a moment and all my ego allows me to whimper is "I did". Wrong answer. I watched you walk up to the front-door and then I drove home; where I wept, quietly so my roommates wouldn't hear me because I was ashamed, not of crying but of who I was. Looking back I am glad that night wasn't about *** because it was always your innocence that melted me to my core. It was your smile, a cheerfulness that often left me confused. The world was a terrible place and yet you smiled when you looked at me. You were so beautiful and I so ugly, and because of that feeling I did ugly things. Today; I can say I forgive you. I forgive you for never forgiving me; leaving me behind was probably the best thing you ever taught me.
With love, always,
Jonathan R. Potts