Breaking Up

Breaking up has been like pulling cat hair from a sweater. Every few days again it irritates me, itches behind my eyes, against my skin. And I keep pulling it all off, removing the memories and irritations from me. I collect them in a piece of cloth, tie them securely away from my bed and closet. Before I leave the state I will tie these pieces to my furniture which I sell, burry the memories and swollen tears here in this city to compost and be digested by the earth that changes seasons. While I am gone my heartbreak will fall apart atom by atom and create fresh air and soul for all those left behind here to fall and sow their own love from here on out. My ruin creates the new platforms for all around me, and by the time I come home again it will be a new form, something I no longer recognize as my own past and waste.

In a week and a day this no longer needs to be my story. I will no longer work in this building, wander these streets.

My hands are full of my suitcases, my own stories, clothes and candles. Rocks I picked from the many shores I have stood upon, the oceans I have waited before. My heart swollen and raw, my house left behind, I will follow that path to my own kind of western dream. This is a manifest destiny I had no idea was coming, even as I lay the groundwork, placing stones only as far as I could see, ignoring the fact that didn't know where the light would next shine.

All the jars that line my walls have been unscrewed and the energy is no longer aligning. There are accidents of fate, physically ramming my body in cars and walls. Each day waking up to a world where there is only me in my room, only my skin in my bed. Each day missing with freshness, washing it off in the shower with a new scent. I restack it all, all the jars. Work to rescrew them safe and sound and in new formations. And my life moves on, as does yours. My heart looks backwards and forwards at once, as I wrap it up tight and safe, travel with it to the next city. This is about me, not you. I no longer know why you are missed. No longer understand what I want to take back from you. I only know that sadness such as I have never known swept through this bed, and now I slowly place my house back together. Pull the knots from my piece of the quilt which I stitched so closely to yours; sew them to a new place. And so you go and so I continue. The tides pull us to a fro, the riptide slips me away to new shores.

My manifest destiny is not the life I had planned or hoped for, but each morning breath fills my healthy warm lungs and each day my feet guide me through this city like every other I've found myself in. I tell myself to remain opened. To wrap the heart but to build no walls. Remind myself to move through the air, to pull it to and from my belly, mimicking how the tide will always pull me. I let my fingers give away each piece of you I pull from my life, let it all get taken by the darkness of the past, be eaten by insects in the place I will leave it.

These memories, the places our lives collided, where I nurtured your entrance to my consciousness so tenderly and carefully and now I let you go in the same way you let me go, allow myself to grow into shapes that will no longer fit into your molds for me.