To Break-Ups

“It’s not you, it’s me.”

 

It’s never me. It’s always you, at very least because you were there to get involved with in the first place. Maybe it’s “us”, but it’s not me, not just me.

Even if we want it, even if we know it’s best for us and everyone involved, even when we are so tired of being together and do not want another day of this, it’s never clean. Never simple. And all the reasons seem dwarfed, as if placed next to The Relationship in a picture for scale, we study it and say, “This? Really? This is it?”

And then comes traveling the terrain the of break-up. No two alike. Sometimes it’s a city, all concrete and skyscrapers, and we are forever looking up and looking down, so that we keep bumping into people. Sometimes it’s a small brush-by, but then we spill someone’s coffee. It’s all over our book. We see our ex and trip. They dissolve into the crowd.

Or we are on a boat, a ship really, only it’s so ancient we think it’s a boat. We have to use antiquated tools like a mariner’s compass and the stars to find our way. We spend the day asking, “Who does this??” and wonder why there are no people left in the world. Except there are. We hear them. We use follow the shoreline, listening to the voices drifting across the water. They sound so easy, so natural. We want to call out but can’t or won’t. We keep rearranging the sails, trying to catch the wind to move us closer to shore.

Slowly, we make our way back. Like any weary traveler, we don’t know yet what that trip really was, but we know it was not what we expected. We didn’t expect to run out of money so quickly, for the maps to be so wrong. But we didn’t expect the Turkish coffee on the patio, either. We didn’t know the afternoon light would be so blue. We never imagined water so clear, we see everything swimming around us.