I am alone now. I am surrounded by friends and family, by people that don’t want to see me miserable. I am surrounded by people that will offer their advice and listen if I need someone to talk to. But I am alone now. There is no way to remove the person I spent three years with and not be alone. I am be surrounded by people, but I am missing that person. So I am alone now.
She left. The passion in our relationship evaporated. We followed the same clichéd course of so many other relationships. No matter how hard I tried, boredom and complacency won. She’s not attracted to me anymore. My friends have assured me that it doesn’t have anything to do with me, but that is hard to swallow. It’s hard to accept that the most important part of my life had nothing to do with me.
Why love at all? Why should I when the outcome is beyond my control. Why spend the time, the work, the heartache building something that will inevitably be torn down with time? Maybe that’s all that love is-a fruitless battle with inevitability. Love is an unconscious lie that there is a force stronger than time. I’ve heard that time heals all wounds, and it will heal this one. But time is what opened this wound.
I am alone now. It is most evident in these last conscious hours of the night. I sit at the kitchen table eating my second dinner. I’m staring at the empty chair where she used to sit and keep me company while I ate. I would scarf down some food, and then she would grab something because I was making her hungry. This is how it’s going to be from now on, me and an empty chair.
I go to the bathroom where we would brush out teeth and wash our faces together, impractically taking turns with the sink in a small bathroom. It would have made more sense to alternate rather than squeezing in and hovering around each other, but then we wouldn’t be able to tell each other the last jokes of the night. This is how it’s going to be from now on, me and an empty bathroom.
I lie here in our bed, where I would kiss her on the head. We would cuddle in different positions until I got uncomfortable and eventually we would go to our separate sides. She usually fell asleep before me, so I would turn to face her. Even though it was dark and I could barely see, I liked to look at her so that my last through before I went to sleep was a good one. This is how it’s going to be from now on, me and an empty bed.
These routines are what pushed her away. These routines were the seeds for monotony and boredom. But these routines are what I cherished. To be completely comfortable with another person, free of judgment and awkwardness. What I loved so much about us was what drove her away. Our late night routines are gone, just like her.
And now, well…now I am alone.
