Today is rainy and cold and the perfect day for writing.
Today is a good day to take all the broken bits of my soul and put them down on
paper (or a computer screen if we want to get technical). But I don’t want to
write. I want to curl up in a ball and submerge myself in the pain, in the
emptiness, in the hollow bit that is left in my chest until it swells and grows
and consumes me.
I want to be consumed with this pain because it is all I
have left of you. I cannot let it go because once it is gone it will be as if
you never existed. When I left your house… our home… I left everything you gave
me, everything that might remind me of you. I deleted all our pictures and all
of our texts. I blocked you on social media and messaging apps and asked you to
block my number because I know that I will have moments of weakness where my
heart is bleeding and my soul is aching and all I want to do is hear your voice
and feel it ooze over me like an ointment.
‘Don’t contact him’, they say, ‘Go on with your life,
focus on you’, they say. But this ‘You’ that they are talking about is a shell
of a woman. A strong, independent woman who has lived a life filled with things
other people only dream of doing. This woman has travelled the world and
crashed through all the boundaries that had been drawn for her to contain an
ordinary life.
So of course I fell in love with you. Because it is you.
And there is nothing ordinary about you. There was nothing ordinary about our
love. It hit me like a stormy ocean wave, knocking me down… and the waves kept
coming, ceaselessly, mercilessly, leaving me tumbling, arms flailing and legs
kicking, pulling me under again and again. With every rushed breath I took when
I made it to the surface, I waited for the next wave to come, to wash over me
and submerge me in water that stings my eyes and every wound on my body… in
water that stings and heals every wound in my heart.
Under the water I would fight, fight to get up to the
surface and the air I would so desperately need. I would gulp it down and drink
it in and excitedly anticipate the next wave. Because I am a mermaid, you see.
I live in the ocean. I love how powerful and unforgiving it can be the one day…
and how calm and peaceful the next…
That is what our love was. An ocean. Roaring and crashing
and threatening destruction one day. And calm and quiet and peaceful the next.
It was vast and it was intense and it brought storms to our hearts but it also
brought quiet. The kind of quiet I thought I would never be able to feel with
someone next to me.
So I emerge myself in the pain. In the loss. In the
memories of you… of us. Because I am a mermaid. And I need an ocean to survive.
One day, I hope, that you would realise that you came from the ocean too and that
your ocean is me.
