This Is How I’ll Finally Leave You

This is how I’ll finally leave you: I won’t. I know what needs to be done but there’s something about us that will always pull each other back in. You’ll linger like a dying breath, and memories will cloud my mind of how wonderful our world used to be. Your occasional, random contact will be a welcome distraction from loneliness. I’ll know it’s all wrong but I won’t care. Maybe someday when I’m strong enough, I’ll up and go.

This is how I’ll finally leave you: Like all the ways I have before. I can formally break up with you and take back my clothes and my betta fish. My friends will tell me I was strong and smart for ending it. Communication with my parents will open up again and they’ll be happy you’re finally out of my life. I can go places I don’t normally go and drink more than I would normally drink. I can kiss boys and I can kiss girls but you won’t be far from my mind.

And then I will lie in bed at night and think of when your sleeping form used to curve around mine. I’ll dream of the way your green eyes used to look at me like I was the most perfect thing you’d ever seen. If I close my eyes long enough I’ll almost feel your heart beating like mine, two hearts tearing each other apart. I’ll miss how you needed me and I needed you. I will still need you.

This is how I’ll finally leave you: I will throw myself into my work in an attempt to distract my mind. Instead of you I can focus on phone calls and emails and meetings, while trying not to think about how lost I feel in this life. This will probably only lead to more drinking and meaningless kissing and storms inside my head. I can walk through the world in a dream, encased in my own dark box of grief, for I will have lost a part of my own being.

I will be tempted by any beautiful stranger. I will make eye contact and twirl my hair. In his eyes I will search for everything you can’t give me, but will only see my own sadness reflected back to me. I will sleep in his bed anyway.

This is how I’ll finally leave you: I can pray for apathy. I can float through my days, waiting for time to numb me. Eventually I won’t feel your pull anymore and you’ll fade away. Then maybe I won’t look back. Then maybe I’ll finally let go of what we never finished. And I can stop thinking that I could be the one to mend you, if only you’d let me. We have this chance to be something greater together than either of us are apart, and I am ready, but fate is not. You are not.

So I can stop begging.

I can stop ravenously devouring any scrap you toss at me. I can stop making excuses for your inattentiveness and late nights and drinking. And then I will no longer have to deal with your self-destruction, your trust issues, your permanently broken heart or your depression, on top of my own.

Misery, misery, misery. That is all we are. That is how I’ll finally leave you, and you’ll finally leave me – in misery.