Shattered Little Boxes

This morning my empty inbox rang like a shattered glass bell and I saw that I had finally heard from you. But the message was devastating and my heart sank into the sickness that suddenly filled the stomach which had been as empty as the inbox only a moment before.

"I've just lost my family!!"

And I didn't know if it had been on purpose or from some accident but my first thought was how you'd said if you ever lost your daughter there would be nothing left to live for. It had gouged bloody trails in my heart when you'd said it.

I wasn't enough to live for. I didn't mean enough to you to keep you alive. I shoved aside the selfish thought immediately, scolding myself for taking you too literally, for reading into things that weren't there but then this morning, when those horrifying words were blazoned across my inbox I panicked. The fear shot through me and I demanded back that you answer me. That you tell me what was going on. I called once. I called twice. No answer. I felt sogoddamnedpowerless.

 I threatened in text that if you didn't answer I would call your mother, call the police, anything to keep you from what I pictured you doing. The mistake I pictured you making.
The Forever Mistake.



You called back then and the cold dead voice I thought I would hear wasn't there. Instead, your voice was pitched for panic. You were begging me. Begging me to sacrifice myself. Your voice was the voice of a man so beyond panic that sense was no longer a concept. You knew what you wanted. You perched on the cold edge of losing everything and you knew instantly that you couldn't let that happen.

So you plead for me to throw myself over that edge instead. And my heart cried red tears. And my heart went numb. And the world began to slow.
And I heard her voice and she sounded so young overlaying your ragged cries in the background and the grief you two shared was so fast and so harsh that I gave you over. My life was so still in that moment. So silent and still and alone.

I felt so old and you two seemed so young that when she barked her harsh curse I almost laughed out loud. Almost. But in the end my still sorrow was all I could hear. And it echoed in all those empty boxes, it echoed in my empty heart like the ocean.



Then the line was dead. And my heart was dead. All those words of romantic love pulled from the insides of valentines candy boxes had seemed so real. Your love had seemed so real but now I knew it was just... what... I don't know. I still don't know. Probably won't ever know if what you felt was real or just a reflection of my own love shining back from your eyes.

The numbness stretched on all day. I slept. I ate. I read. I dutifully removed all evidence of you from my life with the leaden grace of a fishing weight in murky waters. But as the sun began to arch from the sky, as the dark came, those empty boxes began to sing and the lead began to melt.

Now my heart aches with all the tenderness of a thousand heartbreaks and I rage at the "it's just as wells" that are cast my way. And the tears flow and flow and flow and choke me. The ache I feel for you stretches across my chest and into my back, down into my hips and along my legs and feet. Across my shoulders and into my neck, my head, my face. My body is a live wire of pain, electric pulses that echo my heart beat.



No anger though. Only the lost empty ache of someone who grieves, who mourns for a loved one who has died. Because that's what you are. She has killed you to me. She has killed the happiness in me. And she had already killed that happiness in you. And she will kill the happiness in herself.

We're all doomed.