The Blood & The Bones

Dear….

I won’t write your name here.  I won’t call you out.  You kept me a secret for almost a year. So, you will be my secret now.  But when you see this, you will know it is for you.

I could just say goodbye.  That would be enough and you would know the reasons why but I loved you so much for the time that I knew you that I will write you this one last letter.

I will never send it.  I will just hope that somehow, some day, you find it.

We keep weaving in and out of each other’s lives.  Sometimes days or weeks will go by but we gravitate back to each other like magnets.  It used to be that you’d come back and everything felt right in my world again.  It used to be that I thought you were the one I was supposed to be with.  And now, now it just feels like you are a stranger, a failed shot at forever, a man who values anger over love.

I sat in my tub last night for hours and I wondered what would become of us.  I thought about the reasons I loved you.  I had an entire life with you built in my mind, I used it for comfort.  I went back to it when this empty feeling, this longing, was so great that I could barely breathe.  I held it when I could not hold you.  I replayed memories we never made over and over in my head when I would not hear from you.  There were so many times when hours or days would go by without a word.  In those periods of silence I would think of you and I in that cabin in the woods.  I would tell myself just to hold on and we’d have that some day.  I was so dependant upon this idea of us and the future I thought we’d have.  I relied on it as a promise, a wish, a happily ever after.  It was the only constant I had, the only thing that never left me even when you did.

I sat there wondering how I’d let it come to this.  How I continued to even answer you after every time you’d disappeared, every text you’d ignored, the plans we made that you didn’t show for, the days you would just disappear then reappear as if no time had passed at all and as if I didn’t die a little each time waiting, the threats you made, the way you took so much from me and gave so little back.  I thought about how you never asked about me, my life, my worries or just how I was doing.  I thought about all the words I’d typed to keep it going.  The questions I asked. The concern I’d shown.  The investment I made in you. The good mornings and goodnights I craved but never got as some form of consistency in our inconsistent situation.  I thought about how imperfect I was.  How impatient I could be.  How soft my heart was.  How I often said the wrong thing with the right intention.  I thought about my jealousy, the way I looked for things I shouldn’t have because I knew what I would find would hurt me.  I thought about my insecurities.  I thought about how I loved too hard and had too many expectations. I thought about how I was someone you could leave behind so easily and without a word when you’d had your fill.  I thought about how I had nothing left to give anyone else because I was giving it all to you.

Maybe you loved me.  Maybe you felt the same.  Maybe you just don’t know how to show me.  Maybe if I didn’t say this or expect that.  Maybe if I didn’t let certain things bother me.  So many maybes.  I realized I’d made up an us on maybes.  What a shaky, uncertain ground to try and build upon.

So this time, I won’t say anything. I won’t send the long paragraphs explaining what you did, why I’m hurt or why this won’t work hoping to receive an apology or an explanation or some reasoning for how you’ve treated me like a thing you can pick up when you want and put down when you are bored.  This time I won’t answer your messages.  This time, I’m just done.  There are no more maybes, no more promises I made to myself.  There is only a you, there and a me, here and we must go on separately.

A part of me will always love the man I created in my head.. the one I thought you were.  A part of me will always hold onto the maybes and the reverie.  But the rest of me has to let go.

LL~