I Am Learning How To Fall Out Of Love With You

I can lie to myself as I twist the story in my mind, exploiting the ambiguity of the details. I can’t lie to the pages anymore. It feels wrong, like my fingertips are betraying my heart and my mind, just like my heart betrayed my mind in it’s blatant denial of all logic.

It’s been noted on multiple occasions that I’m not good at everyday things. I have no common sense, I’m impulsive, I’m clumsy, I ramble, tangle sentences, I forget things, I’m lazy, always late and relentlessly unforgiving towards myself.

Perhaps my greatest downfall is my abstract mind; repeatedly a traitor, leading me astray. I’m always falling into the traps set by my clumsy heart.

I loved you. I can say that in the past tense because in the moment it was love as I knew it. My definition of love is malleable, forever changing in the midst of my experience and introspection but in the moments of knowing you, it was love to the best of my knowledge.

It was love because a weight lifted in your presence. I was lighter than air, my filter evaporated and I was liberated. I couldn’t think straight but I was free and I didn’t care because freedom was infinitely better than the suffocating in the haze of my thoughts.

I let myself believe for a moment too long that you could feel the same. Not that you did, that you could and that was enough to send me over the edge into a void where my sanity was detached and I was an endless stream of thoughts and emotions that came in waves but never saw pauses or endings.

Maybe was my demise. There was no black or white. I was stuck in the grey, the mid tones that formed the overall picture. If I cropped it just so they showed me the picture I wanted to see. A picture where you wanted me as I’d wanted you; caught up in a balancing act of restraint where neither of us could move in fear of toppling the whole structure.

For so long, you were my everything, my inspiration, the force that drove me further in my everyday pursuits. All of the potential energy locked up in an ‘us’ daring to be released. I could write about you for hours on end, I could play music that made my heart shiver, I could make art that made sense of the moment. It was driving me mad but I fell in love with the madness. The curse and I formed a symbiotic relationship as we grew to a formidable size. I was unstoppable.

I wanted to be for you what you were to me. I wanted to inspire you, be your passion because I forgot I was cursed. I thought I owed it to you to in return. The universe does not work in terms of equal exchange though and I am infinitely grateful for that.

I’m not over you yet, because it’s hard and the curse is so intricately tangled into my being that I can’t be rid of it without destroying myself a little in the process. I’m afraid, after being overwhelmed with such passion that I might never love again in the same way. I’m afraid it’ll always be you, and every lover I have will fall short.

How could they possibly live up to what we could’ve been? But that’s all we ever were… a maybe. A possibility, a theory, an alternate universe.

I thought I was never going to be okay again. Thought I’d never think with clarity again because everything reminded me of you, no matter how distantly linked there was always something.

Now it’s a cold night, I’m all alone, I’ve got a cozy jacket on and I look up at the sky. I’m mesmerized by it’s beauty and my own insignificance in it’s wake. I stand there, minutes slip. I don’t want to leave because in this moment I’ve realized that I’m not afraid of the dark anymore. The maybes that might lurk in the dark can’t touch me whilst they hide in the shadows. Schrödinger’s cat can’t pounce whilst it’s still in the box. It’s heads and tails until the coin drops. It’s in this moment that I realize that love can’t flourish in the realm of perhaps. The possibilities and mysteries of you and I are endless. But that’s all they are, possibilities. That’s all they’ll ever be. Anything and everything is possible until proven impossible, but I can’t waste my life chasing the limit of possibility.

I won’t waste my life chasing you.