Summer of our discontent

I walked away because I had finally figured out that you would never care for me the way I cared for you. You were the center of my universe. I had already given up the things that meant most to me just to be with you. You travelled. I followed. I left the comfort of my forests for the shadows of your monuments in concrete. I allowed my family to disown me so I could be at your side. I put myself into phenomenally uncomfortable spaces just to spend another hour with you. And you couldn't have cared less. Or at least that's what you showed me. Hate would have been preferable to the utter lack of concern you mustered. Hate would have been something. Caring enough to tell me to go away would have been a nightmare come true, but it would have been better than feeling my soul ice over while you told me about the women you slept with while I was lighting candles in your name. I thought about living with that for the rest of my life. Trying to hold it together while you continued to travel and send home postcards with a new photo and stories of a new tryst. Pretending like I knew my turn would come. Pretending like it didn't matter. Pretending that it didn't feel like you were ripping my spine out through my chest and laughing about it with your most recent conquest. In the end I just couldn't do it. I decided that I deserved to be loved rather than tolerated. I knew there was someone... there had to be... and it didn't matter if I was tearing my own heart out of my chest...

I spent two weeks sobbing on the floor with a gallon bottle of cheap white wine, chain smoking and wandering through seedy neighborhoods at 3am just to prove that they wouldn't screw with someone who was already dead.

They didn't.

And it didn't bring you back.