Why does no one ever tell you about the injuries you incur when you hurt someone? Why did my mother not warn me of the bruises that would spread like watercolor for every word escaping my lips that made you flinch? Why did my teachers not point to where the skin would raise and scar, darker and more pinched for every time I said I was sorry? Why did my doctors not show me X-rays of the infection spreading in my body like a wildfire with your name? Surely every person who has let someone they love go isn't porcelain and marble. Surely some of us are huddled together licking our deserved wounds or soaking silently together in therapy pools, wax over our eyes and mouths; waiting for our bodies to heal.
There is so much the body does to absorb loss for you. There is so much ache your body will hold for you while you try to make yourself Okay Again. Last night I could feel my eyelids trying to will themselves closed, but I couldnât stop listening to your voice. But today my body is struggling. I can feel someone trying to develop film in my empty stomach. This morning on the elliptical, fish hooks in my lungs clinked like chain mail, telling me I was running nowhere too quickly and without fuel, but I didnât listen. When you told me you would never talk to me again, hives started breaking out on my shoulder. When I saw how quickly youâd unfriended me on Facebook, a narrow cut opened behind my ear. When you started packing up my things at four in the morning, a burn formed across my hips; it was shaped like compunction. When you told me not to touch you, an amaranthine archipelago of bruises rose from the fault-lined sea of my thigh.
I will never be able to make you feel Okay about my misgivings, or how the conversation about them played out. But perhaps there is catharsis in knowing that I am mourning your loss with palpable grief. I can taste your absence in my vitamins and in the toothpaste I almost threw up in the sink. I feel your jaw clenching under my teeth. I feel your disconsolate silence sweeping across my plains like winds. I have heard reports of your resentment and anger colonizing my indigenous good intentions.
What is the matter with me? Why couldnât I love you like you loved me? Why couldnât I be more patient? Why, when I looked through my pockets, my wallet, my aortas, could I only offer you sand from an hourglass whose last grains had already settled? Why is it that I cannot get over the distance I feel between us during the day, when at night you open up like a post-storm sky, worshiping at my feet? Why could I not match your light, your warmth? Why do I feel the soft hillsides of your body with such tenderness; why do I cryogenically cling to stopped time when you hold my gaze or put your hands on my face, but feel a taciturn disquiet when I think of our future?
None of these things is your concern. The ink from these pages will not stain your fingers. My afflictions arenât yours to diagnose or treat. To you, all I am is the thing that broke you. The once-adulated god who has chosen to smite you, despite your faith. I am the fickle thunder in the supercell you were too busy looking at my face to see rolling in behind you. I am the windrower that harvested you from my fields too soon. I am the back-alley bully that has hurt you in a way that tastes like blood on your lip. So what business is it of yours if I cut myself while shattering you?
I hate that I have made you feel unworthy and broken, and worse, I am now trying to pick up the shards of you and form them into a mosaic of your figure, so I may watch over your stained glass body. But even though this is an artwork of love, it still feels somehow condescending and belittling. I am sorry for that. I am sorry for so may things. I am not sorry to sit here and press into my contusions and remember how it feels to hurt someone who trusted you. When the wax melts, you will have forgotten my name.
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