Saying Goodbye

Saying goodbye, letting go, is never easy, especially when you never actually get a chance to articulate the words. You get comfortable, settle into a belief that things are somehow immutable, a constant that has existed for as long as you can remember, and will continue to exist for as far into the future as you can see. But nothing exists in a stasis, frozen in amber and, like grains of sand running through your fingers, heedless of your wishes and desires, the world moves on as it is wont to do.

Then you wake up one day and something, someone, is missing, slipped away like a shadow in the night, and your fingers close on empty air, the sands finally having run out. You grasp and fumble for ghosts and memories, for that illusion of a comfortable sameness, a sleep-walker stumbling blindly in a curiously unbearable lightness of being. Days, years, pass, and still a small, hollow space you can never fill persists, that void where the things left undone and unsaid inhabits the small corner of your soul you keep carefully hidden away.

All you can do is try and box that part of yourself away, meticulously build a wall, brick by brick, fool yourself into believing that part of you doesn't exist. Better to feel nothing than to taste the exquisite loss that lives behind that wall, for if you set that beast loose then you will have to confront no one but yourself. But, like a phantom limb, it haunts you, stalks your dreams, speaks to you in a quiet, undeniable voice in the small hours of the morning, forces you to bear witness to what was, what might have been, what will never be.

She was the first love, the last love, but so much more than that. Companion, lover, friend, she was magic. Refuge from the pain and loss and chaos that had somehow come to be what passed for life, she coud banish the darkness threatening to engulf you, could heal you with a touch of her hand or just a look. She held your heart in her hands, and she guarded it fiercely, standing as a bulwark against the rage and the hurt and the fear, leading you from the night into the day, banishing despair with the music of a pure soul. She was magic.

Some wounds should never be reopened, some wounds never heal. No matter how many layers of scar tissue get laid down, they just fester, as fresh as the day they were inflicted. They are reminders of who you were, who you might have been, and of what you are not. You can try and box them up, store them away, fool yourself into believing that you are a good man, that you have hd a good life. But you are just lying to yourself and to the ghosts, and you can't escape from the things left undone, unsaid. You can't even say goodbye, because you don't have the words.