The persistence of memory.

Dear Time, please don't leave me behind.
       Please don't leave me in the moment of a broken heart, after a love leaves and the other half of the bed goes cold. Don't leave me waking up every morning wondering how I'm going to survive the numb feeling of loss, the empty feeling of that missing piece.
Why is it that when two lovers part ways, one always gets left behind to pick up all the broken pieces, so small and fragile it's even questionable if it can be pieced back together. And the one who doesn't, has the strength to replace the once so vibrant love in an instant.
       For all those lucky enough to have never been left behind, let me paint a picture, a monét of emotion if you will....

       Being left behind is standing in a club watching a car crash unfold. Watching the man who holds your delicate heart in his perfect hands, reach out for somebody that isn't you. Being left behind is being told that he loves you but in that same millisecond throw his arms around another girl and pull her close to his face. Being left behind is watching him leave with her and still loving him so deeply as he does it. Being left behind is being looked in the eye as he disrespects you and pulls her into the taxi and you feel the warmth of the unforgiving tears cascading down your frozen cheeks. Being left behind is knowing you should have left hours ago but you're too deeply broken, you're paralysed in horror. Being left behind is him pretending he doesn't know you when he sees you, like the two years of love and devotion never happened. Like I never happened. Then being laughed at, like your raw emotion is all a joke, one night of comedy with yours truly.
       Being left behind is praying, hoping he won't make the choice to be intimate with her, please God, Mother nature, fate, whoever..... Please I beg you that intimacy was only for me. Being left behind is knowing that he will.
       Being left behind is going home and spending the dead of night crying in the toilet because the vision burnt into the back of your eyes of your man kissing another girl makes you sick to your stomach. Being left behind is playing the bad parts on repeat over and over and over again like a groundhog day of true undeniable misery. Being left behind is being told he just needed space, and actually being stupid enough to believe he'd come back, open arms and open heart.     
      Being left behind is realising everything you did for them, all the support, all the dedication, all the money, all the love, means nothing really in the end. Because sooner or later that tight grip you had on your life will slip away, and they will walk away from you no matter how much you beg them to stay. And you will be so overcome by grief and confusion you will succumb to crazy, frantic to prevent them from falling through the cracks in your tired fingers.
       And your heart will break. And you will cry. And all of the love, the happiness, the laughs, the cuddles, the meals, the plans..... well, I guess they don't matter anymore. Because all that matters right now is him and her driving away into the distance in that taxi. And the longer I watched, and further it drove, the faster my heart started to shatter. Because in that one moment I knew he was gone. The hope had died. He had moved on.

So dear time, please don't leave me behind.

The Operating Theatre.

     A healing heart has never felt such disorientated confusion as it does 3 months post break up. The numb feeling that encompasses an organ once so dominant with the ideology of someone else, now laying dormant in preparation for the next human catalyst.
     After all the heartbreak and falsified hope, unrequited love turned into passionate hate. After the slow and painful acceptance that the love will never return, that he's not coming back and once again you have been left on your own to face your replacement. Forgive it, the heart is exhausted.
     Still lingering in the infinite void between leaving love behind and discovering someone else, it is at this three month time frame that it struggles with the option of either being completely alone, detached from the magnetic attraction of what makes love so addictive. Or... does a heart need to discover a connection so pure that all others that may have graced it will be forgotten.

     I never did enjoy the healing process, my heart and head are caught up in a hospital bed, bound with slings and tubes and doctors notes. It does feel liberating to not be so broken anymore. I can feel the bones mending and molding, the sharp pain disintegrating into a numb nothingness. I can get out of this hospital bed unassisted, a few weeks earlier being so unsure of my future to even stand again. My feet have never failed me, i almost feel a raging guilt for ever doubting them or myself. I am now faced with the decision: to excuse ones self from love or be loved unconditionally?

Ladders.

I'm sure it's not so bad after a while, sleeping on your own. Once the pillows lose your scent and the warm dent in the mattress misplaces your shillouette. I cannot even force the will to sleep in my own bed, it just reminds me of you. I close my eyes, can almost feel skin on skin. Your gentle embrace.

Desperate for the pillows to whisper sweet nothings upon my temples, "sluggy i love you." Replacing the butterly kisses for zebra stripes, face mapped out by heartbreak.

I starved myself for 4 days, i just wanted to look lovely for you. I spent hours attempting a masterpiece to set your eyes upon. Primed, framed, signed. I cried for what seemed years as my effort was neglected. Watercolour taxi seats and streetlights.

I wanted to inhale your hands, your arms, your torso, your breath. But now its just myself and the thought of you, and how it won't be so bad sleeping on your own.

My Babadook.

     There's alot you can figure out about yourself whilst you're curled up motionless at the bottom of a rapidly cooling bathtub, staring at the wrinkled skin around the cuticles of ones toenails. And it doesn't matter how long you lounge, no amount of scrubbing or cleaning or desperate pleading can clean the tarnished soul now living inside of you. You are dirty. No sugarcoating, no softening or dampening. You, are dirty. A dirty soul for dirty thoughts and actions hand-in-hand. You can feel it too.
     I can't stop it. All i can do, is lay in the bathtub night after night and wait for slumber to once again make any form of contact. Minutes turn into hours and hours turns into the bars that trap me inside my own head, and that is where you are waiting. What is a girl to do? Nobody told me that when you are young and scared of the dark, monsters are not the only thing waiting for you to close your eyes. There's something much worse, something else waiting for you to slip into the void between the conscious and subconscious, something that your parents never mentioned in hope that you'd never be forced to meet it, something that doesn't diminish when you reach for the light..... and that monster is known as guilt.
     It eats away at you until you are an empty shell of who you once were, leaving just enough of you behind so noone would even notice you were gone. But now i don't know what to do. I let it in and it's consumed my whole body, i'm stuck in the four walls of my mind, screaming from the inside and all i can see is darkness. And you. I haven't forgotten about you. You're the one who summoned it here and i foolishly let it in, why did i let it in?
    I have never been in this position before, i constantly promised myself "it's not that bad, people have done worse" but i lied and i believed it. This is how it must feel on the other side and now i'm standing here with every single person who hurt me comparing notes and praying for forgiveness. How can i be happy when i keep ruining things for myself? People change, and i am changing, manifesting into a monster which i cannot control. I hate who i have become.

                     I'm afraid of meeting decent people, in fear i'll eat them alive too.

     So i guess all i'm left with is this porcelain cradle and a tanks worth of cold water, minutes will turn into hours and hours into thoughts and flickering eyelids. Maybe soon i'll have learnt how to breathe underwater, just so i can find the words to apologize to you for the monster i have become.

What ties me to you is guilt.

You look reasonably happy for someone who is not.

I don't want to die alone and not be found till my bones are clean and the rent overdue.

Crave. 13

You're tragic, I'm tragic.

I can't believe i continued to respect you, even after you'd taken the food from my mouth.

You starved me for so long, and you just stole the oxygen from my already sunken lungs.

Co2

And it just keeps on coming. Constant verbal mistakes. Things i say that i shouldn't indulge upon. The cake that you shouldn't taste and share with your friends, but you offer it around like an unwanted animal at a grimey house party. Have your cake, eat it and choke upon it.