The Nine Goodbyes Of Your Breakup

The very sad truth about goodbyes is that your lips are often the last to know it. See the first goodbye is uttered between 3am bodies, restless in the night, slowly inching apart towards opposite ends of the mattress and your hands never touch – and rather than awakening to find your sleep-covered eyes locked with your lover’s gaze as you always have, you will instead find yourself staring up at ceilings or into crooked shoulder blades with edges crueler than a cliff face.

The second comes in those rare moments you now spend alone. Where conversations without ends once flourished fewer words are now spoken– with points sharper than spearheads and phrasing blunter than cement bricks. Searching for words which once came easy will become excruciating and the silence will slowly sour your hearts. There is now no turning back.

The third goodbye will appear in those nights out apart, each shaking and strobe light-licked body will become a what-if, and you will hold the stare of a stranger for just a second longer than you should, and even the emptiest of promises will cause your skin to sweat. You will kiss the love out through your mouth and call it a mistake. You will fuck the hurt out of your skin and call it nothing because it is.

The morning after you will return to him, and your conscious will hold inside it more guilt than the verdict of an open and shut murder trial. You will ask him to sit and the trembling in your hands will speak the fourth goodbye while your eyes scream the fifth and the ums and ahs will spit the sixth, the seventh, eighth and ninth.

And you will find that when your lips at last whisper goodbye it will not pain you like it should, because your heart will have spoken it many times before, it was simply misunderstood.