Stirringofbirds.

Fragility is marked by the way my hands shake. It is marked by the restlessness at night and the slow tiredness during the day. The day your eyes faded from my memory was the day it all began; the cold, panicked lurching of my stomach and the pounding ache in my head. The pills didn’t really help, but that didn’t stop me from swallowing more and more of them, just as the doctors prescribed. Fiona became concerned when I stopped resisting the prescriptions and began welcoming them with open arms. She told me I was letting the doctors and my parents cloud my mind and judgment; all I know is that once the anti-anxiety pills are down my throat and in my bloodstream, your absence is a little bit easier to bear.

            I remember coldly sunlit afternoons with you. I remember heat soaked mornings in the summer time, sweat making my skin stick to the sheets and our hands slide off each other’s bodies. I remember the taste of your mint gum and the feel of your chapped lips against mine. Sometimes, if I hold my breath long enough that my head feels light and I get dizzy, I remember you saying that you love me. Asphyxiated by love.

            There was a time where I would rant and rave to my therapist, but now we just sit quietly and stare at each other, silent challenges being proclaimed by the pursing of her lips and the clench of my fingers. She wants me to talk about you, needs me to speak about how you’ve failed me and I’ve surely come to realize it, but I can’t do any of that because I would be lying. Strange, isn’t it? That I’ve lied all the time but now when it comes right down to it, when it comes down to you, I can’t lie to save my life? And maybe that’s what this is: people trying to save my life.

            You sucked as a hero. I wasn’t looking for one, though, so you made the perfect villain. A distraction in time, a pause in momentum. While everyone else was fretting and scolding and progressing to screaming at me, you were something calm. You were the eye of the hurricane; trouble looked like it had passed, but in reality, danger was merely lurking a few minutes, a couple hours, away. I could lose everything I had if I gave in to you; I could be as weak as you presumed I was.

            Words were at your hands. You could manipulate and form and fracture every living, breathing thing into a sentence and break it down into something subtly significant. While I drank and drank, I imagined you sitting at some scholarly desk writing words that didn’t mean anything to you but meant everything to me. I imagined a brooding figure, but discarded this idea as too dark. Too clichéd.

            The things I noticed about you were as starkly forbidden as every glance that I stole. I was a fugitive on the run. I wanted to be the girl who broke everyone’s heart but instead I was the child that people had to take care of. You became a symbol of freedom, and that was the word I repeated over and over to myself while dreaming of better days: symbolism, allegory, and metaphor.

            And now I drink. I drink and drink until I can no longer taste the vodka or the whiskey or the Scotch, and I drink past the disapproving looks of my best friend, and I take my pills and I wonder what the fuck is wrong with me as I lie curled on the floor, wishing I could wretch out the beating of your heart. Wishing I could be at peace. So I drink more, until I no longer care if the cats eat off my face or not if I suddenly die.

            I remember things about you. I dream about them, and I don’t mean to. I think of your smile. I think of your sarcasm and your failed attempts at trying to make me understand math. I remember the way your hands moved, how your finger curled, how your mouth and your wit kept up with each other.

At the end of every night, all I am reduced done to is a drunk who watches documentaries and pretends to be important. At the end of every night, I wish that I was more then what I am. At the end of every night, I take one more pill and one more swig of liquor.

I will continue to pretend that this is what is best for me. I’ll continue to ignore the good will of others as I finish off the bottle of Absolut.

You will forever be in the depths of everything I am.

I was panicking and you were calling me on it; saying that this decision I was making was too drastic and that it was something born out of the fear out of the unknown. I couldn’t logically argue with that, but I tried to. You asked me for reasons, you said you’d slow down, you apologised, but all I could think was how badly made I was for this. 

“You don’t want to be alone for the rest of your life. Nobody does.”

Of course I don’t want to be alone forever. But I can do it, and I would rather be alone and holed up in a cabin then in a place where nothing could ever heal. I didn’t want to end up in my therapist’s office with your name on my lips. I wanted you to be kept separate from everything bad and yet here I was, making such a mess of it all.

In your letters you would write in Latin, something that I loved. We would debate and argue and sigh with each scrawl of the other’s words. When I picked up the phone in the early morning and your voice was on the other end, everything was okay. I was safe.

Now, I’m here. Without you because these other fuckers have made me so damaged that I can’t accept the fact that I could possibly be loved. There’s no sense in it. Everything was a betrayal, and I wanted the memory of you to be seperate from the memory of the jack offs who’ve used and left behind before. “Maybe this is why I keep you around…” as if I’m trash. A beaten dog who keeps coming back for food and kicks from the steel toed boots. 

So the fact is, I miss you, but here’s another fact: I’m not going to let it rule me like it did before. What happens, happens. If it’s meant to be, it’ll be. Those are my mantras and I’m trying really hard to keep repeating them.