Love Is Built On Actions, Not Words

I guess it’s easy for you.

It’s easy to pretend I never existed, to make me disappear with the wave of your magic mouse click over the “block user” button on Facebook. To scroll through each photo on your phone and delete the images, over and over, just like you used to watch that favorite movie of  yours over and over, a monotonous motion, and a testament to your OCD-qualities. It’s fairly simple to take each of my belongings that I left at your house (it’s okay…those earrings were only my favorite pair), and….and what? Burn them? Put them in a dark corner of your closet, until you decide what else to do with them?

I guess what you’re doing is sticking your fingers in your ears, closing your eyes and blocking out the past several months. Maybe in reality, your life goes on as normal. It’s like we never had that first date where you picked me up at the train station and we bonded over 1930’s comedy and weirdly-named beers. Your new life is your old one. You go to work, come home, and instead of exploring wineries, nature preserves and freshly-ironed cotton sheets with me, you drink with the boys. You go out, and you laugh a little harder than you used to. You fill the nights with watching CGI-laden action movies, because you know I never really liked them anyway. Maybe you even turned your Ok Cupid profile back on, searching for a new somebody to tousle with. Who knows? Maybe you’ve already found her.

At this point, your friends and family are playing along. They may have stopped asking questions about what happened. They probably assumed, after all, that I was the quintessential crazy bitch, or that I cheated on you, or something. I wasn’t perfect, I know. I got a little jealous, a little scared and I trusted a little too easily. But after all that time when I was the most important person in your life, when you gushed about me to anyone who would listen, and when you would ask female friends about their engagement rings…how can they not make me the perfect villainess? They probably accepted you back into singledom with open arms.

I guess I’ll never know.

But I’m here to say that I haven’t disappeared. That just because you blocked me out of your digital life, doesn’t mean we never happened. I was the first woman you ever spoke about marriage with (or was I?), and I was the first person who knew the secrets of your family (I thought so, anyway). I was your first foray into the decidedly un-vanilla side of the bedroom, and our sexcapades (you said) brought out a new man in you.

Words, more than our hundreds of memories flood my mind when I lie in bed at night, words of promise and future and together and always. But promises are fragile, and they break. You see, it takes a lot more than words to make love work. It takes action. It takes a bit of hand-squeezing, screaming and fighting–with each other, and for each other. But what we had were those promises, before we really knew what they meant, and before we really stood naked in front of one another. That’s what we built our foundation on. They were pretty words. Seductive, powerful words. But they were made up of letters and nonsense from romantic comedies. They came from our mutual desire for a happy ending, but they were inhibited by your inability to read all the way through to the last page.

When I lie in bed at night, I wonder if when you close your eyes and your tightly-wound mind is at rest, if you think about those words too. I hope that you smile, and that you don’t forget the sound of my voice as I echoed your sentiments back to you. Sometimes I hope you’d whisper them to me again. But mostly, I hope that one day, somewhere, somehow…you’ll actually mean them.