letter from the past

not really a story.. just something I wrote to an ex back when we were together.

It’s hard to explain the depth of urgency I feel when it comes to you. I panic to know you are real. Not in a sense that I question your existence, but that I question the sincerity of it. Of how your being intertwines with my own. Are we one? Or are we but an illusion of meshing souls? How would we even go about perceiving our stance along this subtle line of truth or fall out? It is as if we stand on a cliff side, one foot teetering over the edge and the other firmly placed on solid ground. We manage to grab a mere taste of contentment only for it to be sucked out of us due to imbalance. And when we fall, if we fall, what is there to hold onto? Do I grab the ledge and fight my way back up? Or do we hold onto each other and free fall? Not knowing is what scares me the most. If I reach out for you in those desperate yet defining final moments, will you take my hand in yours? Or will you turn and hold your own instead?

I spend a lot of my free time contemplating whether or not I alone am enough for you. How it could be that I am now if I haven’t been in the past. Wondering if this is but an unending cycle of heartbreak and yet telling myself it’s worth the risk; that you’re worth it. That, in the end, this fog in our relationship will clear and bright as day we will shine renewed and restored and happy. Not the aged sort of happiness either. The young, unbridled sort of spirited, unintentional happiness like we used to feel when we had found each other in the midst of our uncertainty with the rest of the world. I was stumbling through life and you, well, you gave me balance.

But that was a long time ago. So much has changed and it feels as though these years have beaten down on us like a relentless sea; wave after wave chipping away at our foundation. Each cheap shot, each unearthed sorrow, each worst fear made real steals away the precious memories we’ve made together. And while I don’t want it to, it grows like a fast approaching night, overshadowing and drowning out the things that made me so sure of you; so trusting. And though we’re together still, I’m stumbling and I’m struggling to find the pieces of the light we’ve seemed to have lost. And I feel as though I’m a child, panicking and desperate, tears welling up in my eyes but I won’t let myself cry because that would mean I’ve given up.  And I keep telling myself that around the next corner I’ll find you and we’ll be reunited amiss all our unwanted chaos.  

Sometimes I find you, but I can’t approach you. My mind becomes flooded with images and moments and words that I can’t forget; things that I can’t let go of. It’s like a terrible movie that I can’t get out of my head and it’s replaying over and over again in my mind. And you see me and you reach out for me and I turn and run and get lost again. And my eyes spill over and I sit down in the floor and just cry because that’s all I can do; because I’m scared and unsure and I don’t know what else to do.

It never fails to blow my mind that I need you so badly and yet can’t let you near me. To be so attached to someone that doesn’t realize that half the time I’m drowning. And I’m usually drowning because you drown me out. And I become noise in the background.And I begin to feel as though I no longer exist within you where it matters most. That I have become a recollection of a feeling once felt so strongly that it has managed to linger on this long. That, for you, what we have left is nothing more than a hollow shell of what we had. And I resent you for all the things you put me through just as you resent me the same. And I hear you tell me things that once made my heart stir and I fight to not dismiss them as lies.

It’s a shame that if I told you any of this you would crumble beneath weight of its truth.

It’s a shame because you would make it so.

Because you wouldn’t look for a way out.

Because you wouldn’t look for my hand.

You’d just hold your own.

And I would stumble past you to a rocky bottom.

And you would face the world again because you weren’t strong enough to face us.