Eulogy

She uses the same words to describe the way you left me as I did to describe your smile.

Wicked. Devastating. Incomprehensible.

I once used them to paint a picture of my favorite lips, while she uses them to breakdown the cruelest thing one heart can do to another.

She’s never seen me so still. She usually spends our hour together chasing my hands with her eyes as I animatedly gesture and play with my hair. Today she studies them as they lay lifeless in my lap, while my feelings for you collapse in on one another to anchor me to the couch. She has so many questions that I don’t have answers to because you forgot to leave them behind when you left. As if you might have needed them wherever you were going next. Maybe you were just saving them for a rainy day. Our roles reverse as I shift my focus to study her while she sorts through the wreckage of her line of questioning for something only I would know the answer to.

What’s the hardest part? Aside from, of course, trying to itemize the remnants left in the wake of a natural disaster.

That’s what this is, isn’t it?

The hardest parts don’t compete for rank; instead they all keep each other company as the collective ache that sits under my ribcage. The one that climbs into my throat and tucks itself into a ball when someone dares to ask where you went. It’s all the hardest part. The pieces don’t exist independently from one another. The hardest part is the seconds after waking in the morning when I temporarily forget that you’re elsewhere. In someone else’s bed. Kissing someone else goodbye while holding the tea she woke up early to make you. Sending someone else your ‘goodmorning’s. The hardest part is hearing your words fall from my mouth in casual conversation when I forgot they took refuge there. The one-liners from our favorite show. The things you used to say that would make me roll my eyes at you or call you an idiot. They sounded better robed in your voice, but as you get further away I forget exactly what it sounds like and my body expels them in my own instead. An unwelcomed attempt to tether you to me. The hardest part is knowing that you have my heart in ink. Every single word that I hand picked and examined in natural light before committing to paper rests folded in the bottom of your sock drawer. The side pocket of the bag you keep your work clothes in. The bottom of a wastebasket. Maybe you never unfolded them. Never ran your fingers over the words as if they were braille. They weren’t. But those words were as real as I was and I swear if you did you could feel me within them.

Maybe you did. Maybe they just didn’t mean as much to you as they did to me. The hardest part is knowing that one day someone is going to have the courage to love me back and he will say to me all the same beautiful things you once said. But I wont take him at his word because I mistakenly did that once and in the end I came undone. The hardest part is knowing that he’ll be the one that deserves to be loved the way I loved you and I don’t know if I’ll have anything left of that. The hardest part is no longer being able to smell you on the t-shirt you left the first night you fell asleep beside me. Or feel the ghost of your hands on me – whether it was the routine of your fingers at the small of my back or the pressure of your palm around my arm, steadying me when I almost tripped down the stairs on our second date. I swear the fall would have hurt less than this. Or maybe it’s no longer being able to hear your laugh when a memory of us dances through my thoughts obviously unbothered by the audience that meets it. No longer being able to remember what it felt like when you would turn over, half asleep, and press your lips to my forehead before giving your most vulnerable self to me. The hardest part is sitting across from her in this air-conditioned room that feels smaller than it did two, three, four, months ago when I told her all about the boy who reaffirmed my belief in love. This is it. The hardest part.

The one that casts a shadow on all the other hardest parts.

Sitting here now in this too small room, with her eyes on my hands, while I eulogize the boy who wrapped my belief in love in the answers to her questions and tucked them in his back pocket before closing the door on me.