A letter to the one I don’t want to admit I still love

Perpetual winter


I want to hate you.
Don’t we all feel that way about some people?

I don’t even really want to want to hate you.
Where are you anyway?

You damn fool. You still feel me when you sleep against her. Her hair, her smell, her skin, her breathing. Isn’t she lovely? Really.

In your dreams I know you see the “ifs”. And no matter how collected you are and perfect you are and clean you are – no matter how composed and intensely focused you are, those messy memories of us cloud you.

It’s all about the, what if’s, isn’t it?

But who in the hell cares anyway?
This mini obsession I have with the wonderings about you add up like small dollars and tiny cents. It was expensive to have experienced you at all, on any level, in my life.
I have been paying on the interest and feel like I’ve just begun bargaining with the principal. And I still have a long way to go.

When can I finally upgrade from you? When can I at least trade in this broken heart for a newer one? Perhaps one with a different vibe, smile, texture and color. At least it would be a variety on this pain. A buffet of gut wrenching is better than the same ol’ everyday, predictable and petty disappointments. It would at least give me the thrill of the un-expected. You remember how I enjoyed playing with fire, don’t you? I like skating the unstable edges of piercing cliffs and cutting earth. There’s just something so divine about the hurting that reminds me of my closeness to apathy. It’s just a quick, steep and fast death fall ahead.
So, at least pain that I don’t expect - keeps me on my toes and reminds me that I’m living.
If I only could say that I’ve been hurt by another this way. I want to say that I have – but no. I tried to. At times I may have stared deeply into myself in a mirror until this person in the reflection became a blurred, melted fleshly version of me. She became part of the glass and evaporated away. I was searching for a kernel of something that would convince me, sincerely that I have bled for another him.
But, no.
Instead, all they’ve ever been were just other let-downs. Like flies and honking horns in the distance never letting me sleep. But never like yours.
I wonder if the veil over my soul has thickened like the dry callous on the balls of my feet, and have become themselves like those dark, old timeless rocks existing in a vast, isolating land – never uncovered.
Damn how I long for that sweet pain of slipping and slicing myself open. That deep, violet haze of pain that rises like smoke in a room on fire.
But for that I’m guessing I would have to open up this cave, again. And at least for now, it seems that snow is still falling on those steep and sharp edged cliffs. Sleet is still slick up against the pavement and the bitter cold is breaking the bark of an old oak outside my sunken lair. I will hibernate until the first trickle of melted ice, like a bug, sneaks its way underneath me and into my hiding.

This winter has been a blizzard and even the sun holds out his hands, bloody & filled with sharp ice. Stabbing, cutting, hard frozen water.

This is how I loved you. This is how you loved me back. Such sweet slicing pain that created a dichotomy inside me – splitting me in two - like ice cracking rocks in a perpetual winter.
You see I want for you to come back and hurt me again. Summon out the purple from my beige. Conjure up my red from my still white. Bring out the black from my clear and lucid pastel.
Come and bring this pain, sharp and cradled in your hands, and make me hate you again.
So that for one brief moment I can remember how it feels to want to love someone else, anyone else, but you.





For G.