This is How You Lose Her

I don’t know what time it is.  I refuse to look because it makes being awake worse. I’m caught in this buzzed state, wanting to be quiet, mind and body, wanting to be accepting and still and lie next to you, strewn diagonal amongst the chaos of covers and unsteadily tucked sheets.  I know it has been hours.  I’m too sensitive of time and my perception of it surreptitiously slips in as I wake before alarms.

I’m angry.  I’m angry you revealed moments before sleep that you’re looking for jobs in other cities.  I do would do anything with you, a dangerous gift.   I would marry you, I would live anywhere with you, but this possibility of leaving, of deserting, is true and real and because I love you I want it for you, but I also feel myself fracture. We may not be forever, I realize for the first time.

I am not scared to be emotionally demolished. It’s the untold that tangles my mind, my reality, my stories, my past into a ball of prison bars I can’t escape from and that chase even though it’s deadly and dangerous and I’m scared.  And after I’ve tried turning my back to you and shimming in the sheets and lying my head at your feet and switching directions a few times, after a drink and the bathroom, and breathing deeply and longingly, as soon as I’m close to the soft safety of sleep, the panic procreates, capturing my chest.

You sleep next to me.  I go to the floor, eating almonds and reading a book, clutching the metal bed leg and wanting you to sit on the ground and talk to me.  You won’t and shouldn’t and part of the reason I am so compelled by your being is this very reason you’re not.  I know I can’t tell you this, but if you move, I move.  If you travel you come back to me.  Life and love and finding this uniqueness with you is not a game to play with, it’s a thing you never, ever run from.

“I just need to know that we aren’t supposed to be together, ” I say to you through the phone, months later after break-ups and four and a half work happy hour margaritas in which I encouraged my manager to take shots chosen by the brusque bartender.  This idea of “supposed to” is a notion still in scrutiny status as far as its existence goes in my mind.

My tears run down my chin as they tend to do when one elevates her legs and feet against the wall to calm her nervous system like her therapist instructs her to.  I’m waiting to feel the relief that I experienced the last time I spoke to you, that dissolution of an ideal that no longer lives.  But instead the certain hallow of my neck becomes dejected in saline matter and you tell me that if we were still together you would be asking me to move to Missouri, where you are now.  I would never move to Missouri.

Tags : breakups, dating, Dating for Women, Health, Issues, life, moving, personal, Problems, sad