September Laura Elizabeth Horgan   © Copyright 2021 by Laura Elizabeth Horgan

Photo by Rhys Fradley on Unsplash

I’m breaking and I don’t know how to show you the cracks.

I’m not sure if we can be pieced together this time, but I’m trying. I keep my mouth shut and hold it all back. The dam won’t break even when its full. Even though this time, it feels empty.

Did we lose ourselves on the way? Did you turn left where I turned right? Breadcrumbs can’t trail me back to you, I want to go forward. The girl in me now doesn’t wish to keep looking over her shoulder at what has been. It’s too late for that.

Ten years is a long time. Ten years of trying. But now I am holding onto the ghost of us, what we no longer are. Do you feel the same? Or am I going mad? Can you feel this too, or am I dancing alone?

I still remember the first time you looked at me. You don’t look at me like that anymore. With want, with desire, with a desperate need to taste and touch. All the memories remain vivid and alive, like we didn’t just let them die. If I tried, maybe I could bring us back to life. But what if I no longer want to try? I’m scared to admit that giving up, might be exactly what I want.

A new page. No.

A new book. Blank pages. Hundreds of them. No marks or memories to be found. Empty space waiting to be filled by me, and only me.

This feels like a dirty confession. No eyes but my own are to see these awful, awful thoughts. Especially not your wonderful, kind, beautiful heart. Because hearts have eyes. They see, what at first glance, we miss. I’m sorry. Sorry to have given up without a fight. To not have the want or desire to try. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

So many people walk away without trying. I want someone to tell me it doesn’t get any better than this, and what do I expect? That needy, desperate, lustful feeling comes and goes and what’s left is two people figuring out how to harbor love and take it back to shore, after we rushed out to the deep ocean on high winds.

Are you the sailor or the wind?

Do you guide me, or take me?

Are you the natural element that blows me home, or the hired help who’s desperate for land?

I’m speaking in riddles. But I’m a writer, what do you expect?

Maybe I should tell you straight. Put the words on paper, permanent ink and black and white. Then you can’t erase them. You might choose to forget them, but they were always there.

I think a part of me will always belong to you. A girl who had no idea who she was and had so much self-love to accomplish. A girl that needs love, support, and guidance to hold her hand and help her through turbulent years. That girl needed someone to go on wild adventures around the world with her and tell her she is loved.

You did that. You. Magical, wonderful, selfless you.

How can I ever let you go? But how can I ignore my heart? Or is it my mind that is doing the ruling, and leaving me confused?

I wish the world would give me a sign, show me the way, and shine a light. I want someone to tell me this is what needs to be done. But our life decisions aren’t made by third parties. They have to be guillotined by ourselves. We make the cuts.

I’m not ready to let you go, but I don’t know if I should stay. How will I ever know what the right decision is?

Truth serum is a poison, I’m sure. Nothing hurts quite like it. I’d rather take a thousand paper cuts to the skin that have my heart broken with truth. Hiding in the dark seems like the perfect escape, ignoring everything and everyone until we wake up one day. Reality hits, and we have forgotten why we hid in the first place.

I see other people doing it so well. So beautifully. So, in love, so many years on and I wonder, am I just not built for that? Maybe I am meant to walk alone into that long night. Not knowing is painful. Feeling as if I will never understand is torture. I’m exhausted. So sad of being sad.

So, I leave, let’s say. I leave, and then what?

What if I am destined to watch you afar, kicking myself for letting you go as you flourish and fall back in love with someone better, and more beautiful than I. I fear realizing too late of how great you are, and never being able to go back. Time doesn’t let us do that, it’s an intangible force pushing us forward and we have to learn to keep our eyes the same way, not to look back with too much longing.

But I fear that. Longing for you, and no longer being able to have you.

But what if it’s so different? What if its wild? What if I’m so free and reborn that I don’t think about you at all?

I have potential to bloom again and become something truly wonderful. Magnetic maybe. Fearsome and brave. All these things I see and admire in other women, they may lay dormant in me. But the only way I can access them is without you. I hope that isn’t true. Or do I?

To start again, to love someone else, to have them get to know the bad and terrible parts of who I am, and still want me. That’s the fear. No one knows me like I know me, but you know me better than anyone else. Better than my mother and my friends. You spend so much time in my company, seeing all the things that make me. You have seen at my best and most defeated. You have heard the terrible things I have said, as I thought of worse. You have held me as I have cried, laughed with me, and shared my fragility with me.

We’ve been through it all you and I. But now, I don’t know what I am supposed to do.

Take me back to the night we met.