Write him off.

It always happens the exact same way— the most accurate and vicious cycle: we fade away on each other’s horizons, silently tip-toeing out the back door as to not wake the other, and we steal away into the night hoping we can make the break seamlessly enough to wake up in the morning and forget. We lie in wait, separately. We go on with our lives and intertwined with others, and we’re happy. We’re full. We’re content, but only in the way that you still regret the things you’ve lost. But this loss is always momentary, because we can only hold each other off for so long. Sometimes it’s brief and happy, but more than often we crash into one another at high speeds and are doomed to feel the consequences. We cry, we fight, we proclaim love, and then we decide for the hundredth time that we cannot be involved in each other’s respective lives; the rock and the hard place.

The pity, after all these years, is still that you love me, and that I’m sorry. Visa versa, repeat, repeat. Late one night, in the middle of our perpetual and usual cycle, you told me, you said: “You’ve just got to hope that if we play this game enough times, we’ll eventually figure out how to win it.” And that scared me more than anything. That’s the pity, don’t you see it? We are the best and worst things we do to ourselves.

But I think about you every day and I can’t stop no matter how hard I try. You are cold hands in the fall, and warm smiles in the springtime. You’re all my old favorite songs, and even some of my new ones. You’re numbers and dates I can’t forget, late nights, early mornings, and dreams that reoccur and are only vaguely recalled after awaking.

You apologize, slam your fists onto desktops, drink yourself into a stupor. 
I apologize, wring my shaking hands, lock your letters into desk drawers.

You restate: “I don’t want to disappear while you’re gone.”
But I’m already gone. I’m already gone.

Submitted by jenna2step.

(Photo by emily golitzin)