The Blood & The Bones

You take a chance.  You fall.  You know love can be the most beautiful feeling.  It can fill you up with butterflies.  And, sometimes, it can hurt so bad you feel like your insides are exposed.  Like your heart is just a raw beating muscle sitting outside your body and your ribs are just an empty ivory cage.. You take the chance because it’s worth it.  You take the chance because you are hopeful that this time will be different.

But there is a certain kind of love and loss that can break you.  And only certain people can do that to you.  People who come into your life unexpectedly, usually.  People you never saw coming.  Like a fucking runaway train.  I’m not saying they all are disingenuous.  But there are some that will tell you the most beautiful lies and they, themselves will paint such a lovely story that they also believe it.  Some of these people do this on purpose. Some don’t.  Some actually believe what they are telling you. Some won’t.  That’s the problem too… you never can figure out which is which.

And when they break you the pain changes you without your permission and there isn’t a thing you can do about it.   You want to be who you were but you just aren’t.  Yes, you can be stronger.  You can be whatever you tell yourself you think you’ll be. But you will never be the same.

On the nights alone or past my son’s bedtime when I am sitting there in the in between of chores and sleep or days at the office in front of a bright computer screen or maybe driving to and from to wherever and having a certain song come on, my mind looks for something to focus on and most of the time it goes back to you.  And in these moments when I’ve been forced to think about the way you came and went I realize that’s one of the things that hurts the most. I lett you walk in and out of my life. Because I was trying to be whole again. I was so close.  But the times I shared with you, albeit mostly beautiful, are filled with you leaving first mentally and then physically and eventually it was no longer your fault but mine because I let you back in.  Your leaving was always imminent.   And even though I knew it was always coming, when you did it chipped away at me.  Because how many times can a person come and go?  Do you know what that does to someone who is already damaged?  Maybe you don’t.  Maybe you do and you don’t care?  Maybe what you wanted was a soft place to land but it was too soft and you landed there too many times deflated it bit by bit.  Shattered pieces little by little.  Even the softest or the hardest things can break into a million pieces over time. And so, you’d had your fill eventually.  Meanwhile I was no longer soft… I was only scattered pieces of myself from all the hard landings and abrupt departures.

So, one day you wake up and you are no longer the person you were when they found you because the hurt put you back together differently. It molded you into a darker, cracked and flawed version of yourself just a bit more fragile each time. You become as ugly as what they repeatedly do to you.

Eventually, they walk away for the last time not seeing that they made you a monster but justifying their actions because of who you are now. They changed you. They made you into someone colder, more fearful and callous but cautious too.  Cautious to a fault.  You are there. Yes, it looks just like you but the insides are all different.  Haphazardly connected like some sort of Frankenstein of lost love.  All these scattered bits you grab at and assemble seeing them together with their empty promises and your false sense of hope just to try and appear whole. They look at you and only see the monster you are now because you lashed out, you finally retaliated.  You played games unintentionally for love.  You tried to show them just how desperate you were for them to stay.  You did whatever you did however you did it because you were aching for them to see your worth before tossing you away again.  You craved stability or love or whatever it was they kept promising you in the beginning to secure your affection and then called you crazy for wanting all of those empty promises.

And so, what they have done is made you into a person you might not even recognize and then blame you for who you have become. And that’s just fucking sad because you will never be the same and they will look back and only remember how you were in the end.  Not the sweet girl they loved in the beginning before they used up all your light, your good, your innocence, your calm, your love with their fleeting promises.  They only see the monster you have become without acknowledging just how they repeatedly broke you and how you had to kept trying to be whole again only to become this ragged, tired, broken creature you are now.

……..…

But, in the end, I guess it’s still worth it.  I don’t think I’d go back and un-meet you or walk the other way. Because even though it was painful, at least there were times I felt completely alive.

LL~