Salt In Open Wounds

My heart bleeds and breaks and makes wishes for things it cannot have. My anger is my sorrow, my sorrow, my pain. I don’t know how to disconnect one feeling from the other. I am a river that rages lost and out of control, hoping always to return to you.

I wish I could paint you a picture to make you understand, or make sense of these things myself. The way the pain can overtake me as suddenly as a violent summer storm, living here with you, but not with you, scared of the loneliness that refuses to leave my side, scared of my own future now so uncertain.

How can you live with someone you love and know that they don’t feel the same? How can you live with someone who breaks your heart every time he picks up the phone and you know it’s not you he’s talking to? How can anyone even begin to imagine that kind of pain unless they themselves have felt it?

I thought that I could put this all behind me, moving on from here without really moving on from here. Opening myself to what I thought could be new options, new dreams to make come true. But at the end of the day, my need to displace the emptiness I feel inside is as tenuous as the connections I pretend to make. And nothing and no one can stop my tears once they begin to fall. Not even you…

And I know that it would be best to listen to those that have counseled me, my family and my friends. And I feel bad for what I’ve put them through. Days and nights when they have listened patiently when I could barely speak between my tears or keened my sorrow loudly like a lost child in the woods. They have seen me at my worst; a pitiful broken thing as helpless to make a decision as a newborn lamb and they have implored me to change.

But still I wait. Wondering if someday soon you might remember who I am, and the reasons why you chose to find me when I was lost to you. You came back to me of your own accord, opening doors I thought I’d shut. You made me a believer in fate and perhaps it was foolish of me to think that we should be destined to be together when truth seems to be saying that we are destined to be apart.

The way you love leaves me little doubt that somewhere in your heart there is a space for me. Some corner I’ve already claimed. But even I can see that you’re nowhere near ready to allow anyone any closer than where you want them to be. Love is a dangerous weapon. Give your heart away, and there is a strong possibility that you will never get it back. And despite what we think, we cannot live without our hearts.

And so I’m taking mine back and asking you to understand that my pride, my passion, and self-preservation has made this the only move that I can make. I cannot love you and allow myself to fall apart. I cannot love you and surrender my pride. I will not love you and ignore my passion. And I will not put my entire life on hold hoping and waiting for you to figure out that your next move should be with me, beside me... Together.

Eventually I will leave, and be not like the wife of Lot, who in her need to look back on all she left behind, was left to stand a pillar of salt.