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Had I not suddenly realized that it was dark, and that there was a pile of branches which during the day appeared to belong to the local bums, we would have walked in the woods, our usual haunt. Instead we found ourselves near the bay and gentle colliding waves, the sound of which drowned out the silence between us.
In the city, you can't see the stars. All you really see is an odd glow, a dark, endless slate of gray-blue. So we sit below that, and we think. We think about the two years we had spent together, how it suddenly ended almost a year ago when I fell in love with someone else. I knew I broke his heart. I know his heart is still broken. He has the voice and emotions of a droning pain, dull, throbbing, flat.
I talk through the bay's waves and justify my actions. I am a caring person, and I need to justify this hurt I have caused. Why hasn't he moved on? Why does he have to carry on hurting, hurting me with him? Can't he make things easier, just letting me go?
He tells me he can't relate, can't feel, can't understand human emotion because he doesn't have it himself. If that is true, how did I stay with him for so long? The simple answer is that it's not. At least, it wasn't true before. I didn't do this. I didn't do anything to deserve this. I tried so hard to let him down easy, to keep my wrenching words on a leash so they wouldn't bite. I wanted to be friends still. I still love him as that. And it breaks my heart bit by bit to see him like this.
He is not a drone, not a sociopath, not incapable. He can, he will, he has to at some point. Can he keep living like this, emotions turned off to avoid the truth?
Can I cry now? Can I let it all out, sob at him, let him know it wasn't supposed to be this way? Do I tell him he wasn't supposed to fall in love with me? It would be hypocritical. Can I show him the bits of soul that he unknowingly keeps in secret little places under his bed and in his closet? They rightfully belong to me, but I can't demand them back. I know I did the same thing to him, and somewhere at the back of my own nightstand lies large chunks of his soul.
Why did I do this to him? I love him, but I no longer love him like that. I love someone else. But I still care. I need to stop caring, to let it go.
We still share our hypocrisy, our need to tell each other to let go and then hold on for dear life. It unites us in loneliness and frustration on these nights, and we embrace as friends would. It is thorny and soft, a beautiful double-edged sword that tears at us more the longer we hold each other.
Most couples go to dinner, or the movies, or to the backseat for their dates. But when you're not a couple, you get desperate, and you sit below blank city skies with waves padding at the rocks below you while committing endless crimes of emotional torture and murder. It is a wonder no one heard our screaming hearts that night; they were deafening in our minds, in the way that slowly drives you insane.
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