Since She Left — Learning

Learning

After we broke-up, I had no idea what to do with myself. I did not do anything cliché like go on a bender and wake-up surrounded by empty bottles or sit outside your door begging you to let me in to talk to you and take you back. I simply went home, eyes watery and red, and sat. I sat there on my bed for hours staring at the walls of my room; walls plastered with blank pieces of paper and faced with shelves crammed full of book without titles and anonymously recorded albums, the true identity of the things no longer mattered. My brain had emptied itself from the shock of what happened, and nothing was as it was supposed to be.

It was not as though food had no taste or that music had no sound, it is just that it all seemed so worthless and colorless, as if I was hearing and tasting things, but there was no soul to them to be found. I do not remember falling asleep that night, in fact looking back now, I am unsure if I even did. I just remember futile attempts to busy myself, I tried reading, but that was a bigger struggle than when I was first learning to read, and then I realized it, that I had to learn to be single again. It is not something I wanted to do. It was the last thing I wanted to do. I remembered easily I had combined myself with you, the only person I ever truly loved, and then you were gone. All I could think of the difficulty I would have learning to be a single individual when I had such a hard time learning to read and write as child growing up with dyslexia, and all I knew was that I wanted you back.

As time went on though, I saw you less often in passing, thought of you less often, and then one day you were gone, but not for good. It is funny how you remember things, on occasion you still creep in the margins of a page of a book I am reading, you appear on a page I just wrote, or I can hear you humming to a song as I was able to find the soul of the things I enjoyed most in life. Now, with life as it once was, I am able to remember so many things about us; there are thoughts that fill me with the pleasure of life and make me want to relive them, and there are those that fill me with regret and make me long to change them.

But, of all the memories I have of us, the one I revisit most in my mind, is the time when I was leaving your place after our break-up. There you are, on your deck tears in your eyes, leaning on the rail watching me leave, just like the first time I came over when you were leaning on it waiting for me to arrive. I was in my car cheeks moist with tears, hands on the steering wheel hoping you would come running, stopping me from leaving and pulling me back inside; but you were not moving, and you simply stood there staring at me. So, I fumbled with my keys, dropping them to the floorboards and after I bent over to pick them up, started my car, and looked for you again, you were gone. I could just see you back as you walked through the door and shut it, and just like that you were gone.

Submitted by Tyler T. Read more.