reposted
i don't understand how people can make it out of a room so easily. how people can swivel on a single foot and close a door like it isn't the physical manifestation of loss. i never really tried it until i was eighteen, and even then i was still too young to fully understand its repercussions. part of me knew, and will always know, that leaving a room is leaving what will always be entirely definable and what will usually contain within it something that is just far enough from winable to be devastating. but a bigger, and dumber, part of me (him) thought i could do it without trauma, and i tried. maybe if i had more legs i would have been successful, but having only two, i was crippled. to my knees now, it is muscle memory: the way i clutched the door to hold myself upright, the way i slinked out into the hallway and made sure no one was there, and the way i collapsed into the unused stairwell and made a frantic phonecall.
a room has the distinct ability to break a heart and swallow a piece of it quietly without ever shifting its walls. i could study the paper heart trail left in rooms, bedrooms especially, sometimes bathrooms with cologne smeared against the door where a body slammed and slumped. i envy you if you can leave a room unscarred. because, i guess, i will always be a lingerer. the scariest thing is knowing that love is sealed like a tobacco box, rusted shut.