Like a bulimic whose heart calms as she swallows her fingers. Like a murderer climaxing as his knife sinks and twists into a belly. Like a dog rejoicing as he rediscovers his vomit. I blog. I’ve white knuckled it as long as I can. I’ve trembled as I attempt to keep the emotions and thoughts at bay. I’ve tried to be strong, to be manly, to be healthily independent and sanitized.
In order to breathe, to see the sun shinning, to experience the love I do have around me, I must return to my fingers, my knife, my vomit.
It’s been over two weeks since I’ve heard anything from him. Not a text, not an email, not a thought. Halloween has past. The day I usually set up the tree is nearing halfway over. The snow days are gone and the snow has nearly melted. Everything that could possibly make me think of him specifically is on hiatus. Except for the very real aspect of being awake—or asleep.
Maybe he’s read the blog and sees how pathetic I really am. Maybe he realized I blocked him and all his friends on facebook so that I don’t have to see each update and be reminded of everything that is more important than me and what we had. Maybe he simply decided that enough time had passed and he doesn’t have to give the obligatory contact. Maybe, and here we are at the truth, and that one that hurts the most, I haven’t even entered his head and there isn’t a desire there on his end.
I’d gotten used to hearing from him at least once a week. I hadn’t even realized it. I’d start thinking that it was about time to hear from him, and bam, there’d be a text or an email. Seemingly those days are now gone, and so I have to deal with truly being in his past (I know, I know, I can be a little slow on the uptake).
It’s a strange thing. The bad things, the hurtful things, that have happened in the past with others are still with me at times. When I don’t want them. They can be as real as the moment that I live in. However, the good times seem to fade into fairytale and myth as soon as they pass. The years with him never occurred. It was a dream, a fantasy. Of no more substance than the mermaids that cover my books, walls, and body. Only things that last are real or things that cut and leave scars. The things that were healed and blossomed and grew during the interlude where ripped open, stampled, and suffocated in the aftermath. I was nothing more than a moment, an experiment, as taste of one option that was deemed lacking. I was built up, made to believe and see the man he thought I was—the man I could be, the man I never dreamed I could me—only to have the illusion ripped from my eyes and a mirror set before me.
Now, like the girl, her stringy hair hanging around her face, dangling in the toilet water, guilt rushing into her; the killer with a conscience, tears streaming down his face as warm blood makes its way over and through the hair on his forearm, the blade trembling in his hands, I read my words and am disgusted with myself. It’s bad enough to be the one who was left, the one who had all he dreamed and lost it—to be this man, the one who refuses to shrug and move on, to believe there is more to him that what was ripped from him, the one whose pathetic state-of-being causes those around him to cringe in embarrassment. At the very least, I could choose to be like the dog, who not only has no apologies of his regurgitation buffet, but anxiously awaits the next feast of bile.
