Week 1 - You Gave Everything You Possibly Could
They say that with hindsight, you should be able to see the stress lines, the miniature fractures, the spiderweb of cracks...
...but I don't. Not after a hundred times of replaying us in my mind, from beginning to end, all six months. I run through the moments we shared, those glittering memories with razor blade edges, and no matter how hard I try, I can't come up with an explanation.
It was perfect.
And then it was over.
A week before, we had gone out to dinner and danced the night away.
I remember her fingers toying with my hair, her arms on my shoulders, and leaning in, cheek to cheek, whispering how happy I was and how I had made the right choice to move.
It had been across the country, Seattle to New York, leaving everything I had ever known behind.
I remember every word, every touch, every kiss. I told her just how much she meant to me and how it was worth it, completely, absolutely.
I remember her nails down my back, her mouth on my neck, her fingers on my lips.
-
It was a candlelit dinner, topped off with a bottle from Bordeaux, something fancy for us to enjoy. It started as a quiet celebration, a moment together, a reaffirmation of everything we were.
It ended with a jagged, serrated string of words that gutted me from neck to belly, leaving me bleeding while she watched, dispassionate. Clinical.
"...because you just aren't it, that's why," she says to me, calmly, inspecting her nails as my world ends.
I say something, I think, and something else, words and phrases and protestations and graspings at a collapsing mirage.
She reaches up to me, one finger dark with wine, and I caught her instinctively, before she reaches my lips but then what? I am frozen, unable to move, to think, to do anything but breathe.
Numbly, blindly, I find her palm and I press my lips to it, one second, two, pressing my life, my love into her skin.
I left it there.
And then I'm gone, gone from the pieces of my life and future scattered over that table, that couch, that bed.
Gone from that world.
---
The other side of this intersection is fourzoas' Chillin' Like a Villain, which you should absolutely read.
...but I don't. Not after a hundred times of replaying us in my mind, from beginning to end, all six months. I run through the moments we shared, those glittering memories with razor blade edges, and no matter how hard I try, I can't come up with an explanation.
It was perfect.
And then it was over.
A week before, we had gone out to dinner and danced the night away.
I remember her fingers toying with my hair, her arms on my shoulders, and leaning in, cheek to cheek, whispering how happy I was and how I had made the right choice to move.
It had been across the country, Seattle to New York, leaving everything I had ever known behind.
I remember every word, every touch, every kiss. I told her just how much she meant to me and how it was worth it, completely, absolutely.
I remember her nails down my back, her mouth on my neck, her fingers on my lips.
-
It was a candlelit dinner, topped off with a bottle from Bordeaux, something fancy for us to enjoy. It started as a quiet celebration, a moment together, a reaffirmation of everything we were.
It ended with a jagged, serrated string of words that gutted me from neck to belly, leaving me bleeding while she watched, dispassionate. Clinical.
"...because you just aren't it, that's why," she says to me, calmly, inspecting her nails as my world ends.
I say something, I think, and something else, words and phrases and protestations and graspings at a collapsing mirage.
She reaches up to me, one finger dark with wine, and I caught her instinctively, before she reaches my lips but then what? I am frozen, unable to move, to think, to do anything but breathe.
Numbly, blindly, I find her palm and I press my lips to it, one second, two, pressing my life, my love into her skin.
I left it there.
And then I'm gone, gone from the pieces of my life and future scattered over that table, that couch, that bed.
Gone from that world.
---
The other side of this intersection is fourzoas' Chillin' Like a Villain, which you should absolutely read.