Rising up from sleep, disentangling myself from whatever bad dream I'm currently in, my hand reaches out beside me long before I am fully awake. Still mostly unconscious, my body seeks the comfort of someone that my brain has not yet registered is no longer there. My hand grips cold sheets and discarded pillows, and with that, I surface completely, and instantly wish that I hadn't.
It's been more than five months.
I miss her, still.
When I hugged Alix goodbye at the airport last August, I never would have dreamed that that was the last time I'd ever see her. And that first night without her, when the above scenario played out for the very first time, I would never have believed that ten months later, I'd still be living in the same bad dream. When I fell in love with Alix, I fell hard and fast and without abandon. It was reckless, but it was not dangerous. We fell together, and I'd never experienced anything so thrilling and yet so safe. Two weeks after I first met her, my tongue was tripping over the words that I knew to be true. Don't be stupid, I told myself. You can't possibly love someone after only two weeks. But I did, and she did too, and that made it okay. Safety in numbers, or something like that. Falling out of love, on the other hand, is a much lonelier affair. Without another beside you, experiencing the same deluge of emotion, you stumble along alone, doing things in the wrong order and reattaching pieces of yourself that you have long forgotten how to assemble without help. It's messy, and frustrating, and meanwhile, you're constantly wondering how the other person is faring. Inevitably, as the one who was left, I spend most of my time wondering things like, Does she even care? Is this even affecting her? Did she even love me, anyway?
And that is the heart of it. The mourning comes and goes, fills you, overwhelms you, and sometimes leaves you for a bit, but only to come sweeping back when you least expect it. In the darkness of 3 AM, after the half-awake reach across an empty bed, after the ensuing stomach drop, and even after the deep breath and second attempt at sleep, the question still rings in your head. Did she love me? Like how I loved her?
How could something so right go so horribly wrong?
How can anything ever be right, ever again?
How?
1 comment:
she did.
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