A farewell letter

The sun is wearing its hat today and the clouds seem heavy. -Not quite like cotton candy but more like dust, the kind that you find beneath your wardrobe on a rainy Saturday afternoon. There’s no rain though. Just heavy air, not warm enough to feel nice and not cold enough to turn your breath into a white cloud.

And you’re leaving.

You’re leaving with your hair tied back neatly and your bags and bags and bags. And you’re leaving me behind just like the furniture you don’t need anymore. Just like the things you don’t like enough to take with you.

We sit inside the restaurant, but we don’t eat. We just stare at the imaginary battlefield between us, in front of us. It’s all that’s left because we took everything we could grasp with greedy fingers and we’re guilty. We know we are. And we accept it, just like we let the silence between us stretch out seamlessly and push us farther apart. Just like I accepted the fact that you’re leaving. I can’t see your shampoo bottles in the shower anymore. Your perfume, the one which smells like spring and sunsets and crashing waves on the shore, is no longer on top of the shelf in the bathroom. You’re not laughing quite as much anymore. Not with me at least. You laugh on the phone and while reading letters you receive. Letters, I won’t ever get to see because they’ve disappeared inside your drawer. The one that swallows you whole sometimes when you’re digging and searching and reaching. What are you trying to find in there?

And you’ve changed. You’ve turned your inside out and put a foreign side of you out on display. Did you pull that part of yourself out of the drawer? What I am used to is hidden and swallowed and something I never knew was there is reminding me that I never really knew you, did I?

But I would like to keep a part of the old you as you’re leaving. Because as you’re leaving with your hair and skin and smell you’re ripping a human-sized hole into my chest, taking parts of me with you. I didn’t mind the pain of you digging your claws into me as long as you stayed. It didn’t matter, you almost cut me into pieces when you were there to crawl inside the ruins of my body to warm me up from the inside.

But now you’re leaving me ripped open without stitching. I wonder why a lot, but you don’t answer because you don’t understand. You have been speaking another language recently. One I don’t know, and I spent nights wondering what I’d done to deserve your question marks and irritation. But no matter how much I think about it, it won’t change that you’re leaving. I know the growling beasts inside my head, those I hold back so full of effort, even they won’t catch up with you. So, I sit in silence after you slam the door shut and I talk to the pictures on the walls and the shelves. And they whisper stories to me, paragraphs, novels, consisting of only one phrase: “This will pass, too.”