Mea Culpa

What is the approved conversation for a man or woman caught between the crevices of this place, where each clings to their own shard of debris?

What ought to be our greeting as we pass each other in this flood?

Meted out in minutes, condensed in colour and composition… I am saturated, it seems. There are times when I wish I was merely lost but I have come to realise that is not it. I know exactly where I am and I choose this misery every day. It is all my fault and my patience is the pattering of images that I must constantly pause and pillage through without preference.

Did I mention I miss you?

I still feel the bitterness of our encounters linger across the tunnel of my mouth and I spend my days drowning you out of my mind. I plunge through the moments with my head held high because I refuse to let you relish this particular victory; of having broken something in me that I cannot identify well enough to work around.

I have never really been pathetic before, at least not like this. Somehow, I manage not to wear my bruises openly but I find myself waiting for you every morning in my mirror, dear foe. I wait for you to batter my words against as I drive my way to work. I wait for you to slip your smirk across my desk as I edit hours of ad hoc news nonsense for pages that will never see the light of print. I wait to know myself, once again, in your impression of me.

I hate that it is only you who can tell me who I am.

I hate that it is I who let you.

I shall work around it though, I shall bury you soon enough. Presently, I am listening to Piaff and trying to comprehend why you classified her as ‘bitter’.

“All I feel when I hear this woman is barren waste lands, they are idiotic to think her bitterness beautiful.”

You were wrong, I hear only frailty, but then again you loathe that more.

Of course, I couldn’t possibly understand, could I? I am small, you said, ‘with potential’. I cannot even condemn you for your judgment of me, when I so crave it still. I wish I had asked you to elaborate my demerits because I no longer see anything when I look in the mirror. All I see is what you showed me and while it leaves me feeling incredibly small, it is all I seem to have.

I shall never laugh again, at the sad sufferer. A broken heart truly is a terrible curse: the pins that claw at the insides of your cheeks every time you smile; the scars you wear like medals; the laugh that never quite sounds like it belongs to you anymore. It is excruciating.

You have no idea what nakedness of the mind is like, do you? The kind where a stranger speaks of you, for you and to you and wins on all counts. No one has ever seen your mind naked, unmasked and unprotected and my feeble attempts to unearth it were fumbles at best. I recall they made you laugh.

Looking back makes me realise that I failed you in the worst way possible. I let myself become ‘known’ to you, so completely, enough to become boring. That was it, wasn’t it? You spoke of honesty, but what you were alluding to was a truth that was both capricious and coy. I should have guessed. I ‘know’ nothing of you except what I was hoping to find. You reside everywhere except in that corner.

Now, I find myself brutally raped of emotion. I am broken and I forgive you. I will always forgive you.

You were right, I shouldn’t.

You were right, I will always fall and never rise.