The following is an excerpt from an upcoming piece that I am working on.
I will always remember the day that it happened. The feeling of it. The small cafe buzzing with life and laughter as we sat across from one another watching our relationship struggle to take its last few breaths. Neither of us were strong enough to pull the plug in the moment but I knew. I knew that ultimately it would have to be me.
The car ride was thick with silence. A failed attempt to breathe a romantic gesture into the mouth of something so irrevocably broken. Our shoulders hung heavy with the mass of it and as you stared out the window on the passenger side I held tight to the steering wheel as I drove us closer and closer to the end of the road.
The pavement disappeared as I turned us into the driveway and parked us facing the closed garage door. I affixed my oxygen mask unsteadily and let the finality fill my lungs. With glassy eyes I whispered out our goodbye – dissolution of the contract in which we had promised one another forever. I released you from the prison that had become of what had previously been love.
My heart cried out in the most agonizing way. No sound emitting from a wide-open mouth begging without words for you not to let us go. Not to get out of the car. Not to do what my lips instructed.
Was it never worth fighting for? These years of unimaginable growth and unexpected blows. How you can define me and I can define you but then in one moment, one act, you could take away my co-authorship and sign on with another writer.
She will never love you how I love you. She will never bleed for you the way that I bleed – the way that I breathe – for you.
I don’t see you as you fade away. I only feel where you have been within these echoing walls and the feeling is surreal. I hold tight to them, our reflections, as the boxes fill and the bags are tied. They don’t know that they are grounding me as their small hands cover and wipe away my tears.
