Write about it, they say. So I will.
Maybe I’ll write, now, about the humiliation. About the jolt, the numbness that was ‘shock’, the confusion; maybe even about that kernel of sadness that has since rotted and turned bitter. Would you like to hear about that?
Were you afraid? I wonder if you were; if you knew me, you would have been. I love hard and fast and ferociously. It could well have been forever. Did that scare you?
I could have loved you, given time. Could have liked you in a few weeks. How close I was, teetering on the cusp of affection, dipping a toe in occasionally, but still playing at my self-preserving balancing act; wanting not to fall, but consciously to step down into one side or another. How far you were, and I thought you were close, as close as I was. How prettily you played it- the game and me both, and no rules but your own.
A game with no rules and no stakes, and no end except when you wanted out.
Months have gone by, and I have yet to forget. No broken heart for me to mend, no wounds to lick, no tears to cry and dry and brush off my pillows. No blood. No foul, it stands to reason, but that’s not on. That’s not the way I think, the way I play.
I cry foul, and that’s my rule. No stakes, again, and maybe not even a game. But I still cry foul, and I won’t forget.
It’s hard to let go and find something that might ease the bitter seed inside me that you planted, so that it doesn’t grow into anger. Harder still to find something to sweeten it. It could so easily turn to hatred. I wonder what my hatred would do to you.
Better to fear what it might do to me. Yet I want it sometimes, to hate you. The burn. The ash. The end it brings.
Emotion is a hurricane. I wonder if you ever suspect how much I struggle not to let it rise up and wash you away.
Would it take the rot as well? Perhaps; and perhaps it might take me whole.
How strange it is, though, that there are no regrets. No “I wish” or “If only”.
Sometimes I laugh quietly- at you, at her, at myself. So much to laugh about, if only because I’d rather not cry.
When seen through the shimmer that mists a happy girl’s eyes, you were rather lovely. But what would I give to see you like that forever- to be that girl again? Not much, I suspect. Then again, it doesn’t matter, does it?
Not to you; not to me; not to all else, the infinite number of things that actually do matter.
And one day I’ll dig here again, and there’ll be no seed to find.
Kyabola 