It wasn’t always so… short story 2
April 19, 2010
If only I had known that that would be the last time you would hold me with what I think is love in your eyes. If only I had known that would be the last time we would eat sushi together as man and wife. If only I had known that would be the last time I would awake from my sleep next to you…
It’s all too painful for words as I pack away the belongings of a shared life. I reach and pack away things I will no longer use – a pair of reinforced motorcycle trousers that will never be worn again by me, sat upright as your pillion, riding at speed over country lanes and roads. Photographs of an impossibly sunny day where we sweated and the confetti stuck to our skins. The day that even the sun was blinded by our love…
I will miss you, miss you despite your grumpiness, miss you despite your idiosyncraticties, miss you despite these past few days which will turn into weeks which will turn into months of growing apart. I feel like I’m losing the most important, best thing in my life and I can’t stop asking myself why. Why did it go wrong? Where did it go wrong? Could I have done more, could you have done more? Were we always drowning in our marriage, was it burning up into ash before our eyes all this time?
If only I had known there was a time limit to our kisses, if only I had known that there was a sell by date to our time together. If only I had known these things and then those times would be have been cherished and remembered more clearly. The engraving on the ring, the running through the streets of New York, the watching of movies, the eating of dim sum, the driving in my car, the shared life…
Why don’t you love me? Where did it go – these last few years where I constantly asked whether you loved me and you always replied…yes. Perhaps if you replied otherwise, something real could have been done, something could have been changed but I did not know the severity of your feelings. True I had thought it myself but I always came back to you and my love for you. You are my rock, you are my sole reason to live, I love you and now I can’t live without you.
How can you turn it off? How can you switch the feelings off like that? You say that you won’t feel it until later, that it will hit you afterwards. I want to say that I will always have you back if you change your mind but I know your mind is made up. I know you will never back down. I know you will go through with what you have said. You’re a doer and always have been. The complete opposite of me.
So now the rings are packed away and the photographs will follow, the name will revert back and the change complete. The daily pain will numb, the tears will come, come and go and come again. Our lives will slowly disentangle until we become two separate people again.
