Black Coffee Night

I have lost myself to love twice.

Three times, depending on the shaking nature of my memory that day. Lately, it moves like trees in the wind with light falling at random. Things get lost in the darkness.

...

Don't the hours go shorter as the days go by?

We were going to save the world that night, both his hands pressed around my neck, softly, careful not to hurt me. He poured everything he had inside into me.

I like it that way, almost but never quite in pain.

I wake up the next morning sure I was in the house of someone else, a man I knew once but no longer. I remember the trees where he lived. They met above the road, like a bridge.

What he will remember of me when he's old?

 It scared me right out of myself.

Sympathy For The Devil - Personal Essay Excerpt

He started crying. 

“What do you mean you don’t trust me?”

 Then I started crying.

“I don’t know what I mean.” 

Neither of us spoke for still minutes.

“So what are...what are the terms for this, if we work it out? How do you want it to be?” I asked, voice aching.

“I want you to accept me for who I am. I want you to love me enough that what I believe doesn’t matter.”

 Maybe that was our problem; I didn’t love him enough for what he believed to not matter. I could never love someone that much. But his strength was on Sunday, no place else. 

“Glenn, you don’t accept me. You want me to not ask questions. I’m always going to ask questions. I love asking questions, that’s all I ever do. Why did you think I would ever be okay with us never discussing the most fundamental thing in your life?” 

“Things are fine until you disagree with them.”

 “It’s the other way around, Glenn. I’m fine with you until I disagree with things. Do you just want me never to disagree with things?”

  He looked away, angry. 

“Why were you ever with me if you wanted someone without an opinion? Why me? Why’d we go though all this?” I asked.

 “Because I love you.” 

Silence.

“So I have two options; stay married to you and have parts of the world we can’t discuss, or break up?”

He didn’t say anything. 

People say of love that you never know what you had until you’ve lost it. I think that proved true for us both. We didn’t know the other until it was too late. I find it emblematic that our break up took place via machines and letters and people other than us. It pisses me off that I had to write him emails like a politician, that I couldn’t tell him to fuck off, that we couldn’t work things out how two people that are in love do.

But then, everything that went wrong exists permanently in black and white type. Maybe this way I’ll have to be more rigorous in how I remember things.

 In front of other people, I spend most of my time laughing about it. “I think it’s cosmopolitan divorcee at twenty-two!”

But I feel cheated. He and I were better than what happened. I alternate between believing that he lost his mind and that’s why he behaved how he did, and that I’m stupid and never knew him at all. The more time I spend with it, the more I think that sometimes things are Heaven sent.

I was never meant to see this coming.