This Is How I Found The Courage To Be Alone
Leave. Words are just words to you, and that frightens me.
I am well-versed in vacant conversations where people are too cowardly to admit that they could never love me. I don’t need to feel your cold disposition to know that it exists, and I can sense you are detached even when you are touching me.
“I feel so connected to you.”
I want you to go.
We can forget about the plans you spoke of. Forget about the rocky hills we traversed while we relearned the feeling of togetherness. The Andaman Sea and a west coast sunset were the perfect catalysts for false promises to be made. There is something about a beautiful moment that inspires people to say things that they don’t mean.
“You deserve someone better.”
Cause and effect.
We walked through a shifting tide and you hurried ahead, my presence didn’t mean anything in these moments of exploration. I romanticized the situation. The tides reminded me of the relentless fidelity in nature – that although it will always come time to go, the ocean and the shore will always reunite, they will rise and fall into one another without compromise and without fickleness.
”It’s nothing personal.”
The mind was made to be changed.
You unraveled in slow movements. A meaningful morning’s embrace became a solitary kiss, into just a touch, and then, only offering me a view of your spine. I surrendered myself to your indifference by touching you, and this yielded a comforted sigh from your mouth. Now, you only touch me in a way that seems forced, lingering with some tender curiosity and then pulling away as if I am not worthy of such admiration. Why did you ever declare those grand future plans for us in the first place? They’ve turned to stale conversation, and I am sitting on your bed enduring a mouthful of tension, a pounding heartbeat climbing into my throat with questions that demand answers that are too telling for me to bear, so I never ask.
I prefer hiding from the truth, not knowing, basking in ignorance, this is how I make sure you will not hurt me. But you offer up your stone-clad exterior as if to mock my softness and my unconcealed heart. You are this sentient statue, motionless and blank-faced, but I know your insides are roaring in their complexity. I want to crack your stone façade. I want it to crumble while you stand atop your mountain; I want to source a disaster out of you to show you that my heart is a powerful thing when it becomes heavy.
“Come with me.”
What are we doing?
I have learned that, while enduring change, while trying to exist in a new place where no one knows who you are at your core, people are the hardest things to trust. And the very first thing I did, which may have been the most foolish, was trying to make a home in a person. Haven’t we all done this? We deem love as our safe place, we deem the person who inspires this love as the home where it lives, and in turn, we take refuge inside of them. They are our shelter, our safety, our warmth. How many lovers have I made homes of? And to find that they all crumble. That, a foundation built too quickly, without ration, only made of dependency and fear, can never stand the forces that will inevitably try to demolish it. And it will break, every time, and I will suffer in the rubble.
I have divided myself up in order to enter these worlds. I fractioned and collapsed the parts of me that have already so furrowed and fragmented from all of the other worlds that I have tried and failed to be a counterpart of, only to be devoured into and then ejected from, each time leaving with less of who I was. But I cannot blame the men who I idealize as monarchs, as the rulers of my heart and my body. I chose to take up residence in a dangerous and unforgiving place, and I can only blame myself for having never existed outside of these worlds long enough to build my own.
These isles and alleys and galaxies that did not belong to me were beautiful while I explored them, but they are not mine. After seven years of this migratory loneliness, of being a wanderer who drifts through other’s worlds and draws up erroneous blueprints while stars are in my eyes, that are then used to build fragile homes which broke every kind bone inside of me when they collapsed, after all of this, one too many times over, it is time to create my own world. To build my own home. I told you that I do not have any heartbreaks left inside of me. This is the last straw, the final blow, the only fight I had left in me has been fought and fought and fought, trying to convince myself to stay, trying to convince others to stay. For once, I will leave. It’s time to leave. I’m ready to relearn the rhythm of loneliness, until it is so natural and so comforting that it is only being alone, and that is not a bad thing to be.