She's Gone

The desperation and loneliness of being left behind by the one you love

She's gone. I can't believe it. 

Every time she left, I thought 'This is it, she's never coming back this time" but somehow, today feels different. A certain certainty. It was way too late, she'd been gone too long. 

She's gone. She's not coming back this time. 

Did I love her too much? I always thought it was extremely evident that I loved her more than she loved me back. She'd stroke my hair, she'd hold me and she'd say the words, but then she was always the one who left. I had never, not once in my life, left her. Just the thought of it broke my heart, so I could never understand why it meant so little to her.

I checked every room in the house again with a hopeless hope - just in case she had come home somehow, without me hearing her car or the familiar jingle of her keys. With every dark room I entered, the weight of her absence pulled heavier inside my chest. Isn't it ironic how terribly heavy emptiness is?

She's gone. This time it's for real. 

I feel like I can still smell her - the flowers in her clothes, the fruits in her hair. Of course, I'm merely remembering. She's been gone for hours now, her scent had disappeared into the unforgiving winds. I climbed into the bed and sniffed hard into her pillow, desperate for just a trace of her. 

Finally, as I inhale what I am sure is the last of physical trace of her, my anguish overwhelms me and a shrill, inhumane cry escapes me. 

She's really gone, and she's not coming back. 

I don't know how long I laid there, whimpering and simpering, in the dark on her bed. It felt like hours but it could just as well have been minutes. I was hungry, but my heart ached more than my stomach. 

I hear a low rumbling. At first, I'm not sure if it was just my stomach, or worst, my imagination. I raised my head to glimpse out of the bedroom window. A flash of light. Could it be? The rumbling gets louder. I bolted up from the bed, not daring to believe it. But yes, there it was! The rumbling was getting louder and the light was getting brighter. It was her car! It was her, I knew it - call me crazy, but I'd recognised the sound of her car anywhere. 

In my excitement of getting to the door, I slipped on a rug and crashed hard into a table. But I didn't care, she came back! The hurt didn't matter anymore. She'd come back for me! 

I wanted to get to the door before she did but it took me some time to recover from my slip and she came through the door just as I got to the bottom of the stairs. Then I stopped short, something didn't feel right.

Something was off. She wasn't alone.

She stumbled clumsily through the door - locked in a passionate embrace of a man. They kissed and breathed noisily, his hands running through her hair and all over her body. 

I froze in my place, watching them, unsure what to do. Then my instincts take over. A low growl rumbled from somewhere inside of me and I charged at him.

They heard me hurtling towards them and pulled apart from their embrace, their eyes wide with surprise as I charged head on at them. Just as I launched myself at him, she quickly put herself between me and him and caught me in her arms. 

"No, no, no, no no... What did I tell you about greeting guests like that?" she chastised, rubbing my face and head to calm me down. To him, she says, "Sorry about that, she gets really excited every time I come home. You'd think she thought I came back from the dead every night."

The guy chuckles, leans over me and rubs me roughly on the head too and says, "No, don't worry about it. I love dogs..."