The shape of a heart

You should’ve held on to me.  I wanted you to.  I wanted YOU to want to.  You should have taken the opportunity when it FINALLY presented itself.  All that time invested and it’s just gone.  I’m gone, you’re gone.  There is no turning off my course NOW, and it would have been so very easy at that time.

The link we had – well, I thought it was real enough.  It was real enough for you to comment on it time and again.  It was real enough for you to keep coming back for 20 years.  I know I shaped your life.  I changed you, made you believe there was someone out there who saw the same things from the same angle.  I worshiped you and you liked that about me.  I get it.

You let it slip away.  It isn’t like the disaster that happened traumatized you THAT much.  You were waiting for that to happen since I met you.  It was your only way out.  And then it happened, and SURE there was a big mess to clean up, but you were finally free.  You must’ve felt, in your secret *shhh* soul, like a kid on the first day of summer vacation.  Finally FREE.  It was surely a secret glee, completely inappropriate to show that side, I get it.  But I knew.  I have always known.

I never asked to be front  and center.  I never wanted to be at your elbow, to be in the light.   I liked being the side-dish.  There is less responsibility there.  I didn’t want to spend time in your real life anyway.  Those golf course business cigar scotch people both intimidate and bore me.  I was more than willing to be the cold beer at the end of the day.  The weekend away.  I always WAS.  I just thought we would finally be able to BE.  Even if only to each other.  Just maybe finally with the curtains open.

I had the perfect out.  It was the right time.  The stars finally lined up.  You turned your back on it. 

I haven’t heard from you in over 2 years.  I called and you didn’t have time.  Now I’m gone.  The window is gone.  I’ve made my bed and stopped looking for the clues that I know are still going to be there, because now I’m going to stay no matter what.  I am old now and this life makes me content.  I’m assuming  it’s still happening, but I don’t choose to see it.  There is no point looking anymore.

I still have trouble believing you just turned it off.  I force myself not to think about you because you just can’t matter anymore.  All those years, all of that history, and the life goes out of it without a sound.