if i had a name for this i probably wudn't post it

For years he tried to explain to himself what it meant to have lost her and why it hurt as much as it did. But he failed. Time and again, he failed not because he couldn’t understand but because she never had.

It was easier to assume that they were meant to be because they couldn’t see into the future. If they could they would have known that she was always meant for mediocrity and could not, no matter how hard she tried, deceive her instincts into making the safer choices. He, on the other hand, was meant to embrace mediocrity because the world he belonged to had come and gone decades ago and the world today could not accept his toxic genius.

In the end, he was a casualty of her selfishness, but even in that, unremarkable…since many more were condemned to be harassed by the unfailing ability of hers to love as intensely as she possibly could pretend to love without actually loving at all.

And she was ultimately condemned to be the muse who would make him succumb to his own impossible desires. Who would make him say her name with every word of every language, who would make him abuse her and condemn her through the lives and the people who he conjured up for the sole purpose of making sense of her to himself. But no matter how he molested his own story to craft a multitude of others, he could neither make sense of her nor forget her.

So when he finally slit his throat with the diamond in the ring that she had returned so unceremoniously, it wasn’t because she was giving birth to her third child with the poor bastard who ended up unified to her through divine intervention, nor was it because every woman he tried to love fell so far short of what he came to believe he deserved after losing her that whatever little faith he had left in learning to love again disappeared. It wasn’t even because no matter where he looked he saw despair so infinite that if he were to fall prey to it, he would never land, no despair he was used to, despair was an ally. What finally exiled the resolve to live from his heart was an epiphany. The one he had been waiting for all his life, really. The one that he had suffered all the other epiphanies for. The life changing one, the one that we read about and see depicted in Oscar worthy movies, the one that empowers you to leave everything behind and go head first in search of what you think you now desire, just like she had. The one that snuck up on him while he feverishly typed out the final chapter of his masterpiece which in his life would have finally earned him the attention he so desperately sought, from the critics and the readers and the people who pretend to read and from her. It snuck up on him at 3.42 am on a Tuesday morning and nestled itself uncomfortably between his ears, ringing like an incessant siren \. It spoke to him with authority and with anger and with a tone of finality that in itself was enough to make him reach for the drawer that still held all her personal effects.

Ellipses put an abrupt, unscheduled end to the story he had been writing all his life. A page break finds itself hastily inserted in the middle of the climax where the guy doesn’t get the girl but the strength to leave her instead.

Epilogue

He writes, italicized and underlined and centered. And beneath it he records his last thought before heeding to its command. Italicized and underlined and justified.

When you’ve run out of words or of the strength to recall them, when she is dead and buried, hell, even when the sun is at half mast above your head and the mountains really are like cotton candy caught in an updraft, do you think you will love her any less? You can abuse her all you want, you can curse her and bemoan her very existence, you can trace back her ancestry and swear to build a time machine so you can go kill the single bastard whose demon sperm led to her existence, but you can not hate her. You can not forget her and you can not let go. You are condemned, my friend, don’t you see? Your single greatest regret in this final moment of your existence isn’t that you lost the one you loved or that you loved the person least deserving of your devotion but that you spent all this time in trying to wash off the scent of her skin from your memories when could have ended it all a long time ago if only you had let go of your life instead.

N.B: you're so vain, you probably think this post is about you... it could be, but it's not. However, if the shoe fits...