The problem is this: the idealised, idolised memory bank.
Because at the end of the day, it’s still the echo of him she clings onto. It’s always him. She’s still waiting for the old him to come back - to turn up at her door in the pouring rain and kiss her; as a perfect imitation of movie cliche. Or, she’s waiting for a new him to come along and erase the old him completely and utterly from her mind. Either way, he becomes the central focus; the eye of the storm, the rationale behind the insane.
And because neither of these things will ever happen, she sits in an unavoidable limbo; a dark tomb of water. And no matter how many rocket fire boys she kisses, and no matter how many wolves she lets into her bed, she will still be waiting for the old him to come back.
Because this him is made of golden glass and perfect futures. This him she has invented in her mind to escape the seedling thought that maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t so great in the first place - which means she’s just not found the right him yet. Which, in turn, means she has more years ahead, searching for what she thought she’d lost. Alone.
Alone, of course, is what terrifies her most. She’s been brought up to equate ‘alone’ with ‘not valued’ (by men). And a not valued girl becomes a not valued woman, and a not valued woman becomes a lonely, bitter old lady with eighteen cats. So she straps herself to the one person she believes once valued her; she wears his memory like a suit of armour that says ‘worth something’.
If she sat down, if she let her golden boy go, she might realise that it’s okay to be alone, it’s okay to say goodbye to ghosts. And that this ‘alone’ she’s so terrified of, is really a field with a whole bunch of open doors in it. A whole different bunch of futures, just waiting for her to taste. Futures where she could learn to love herself more than any boy could.
But she’s still stuck, clinging to the hopes of a future that died long ago, clinging to the golden painting of the bronze boy, waiting for his return.
