How Does it Hurt So Much When You Have Nothing Left to Give?
Sometimes there's nothing left but pain and memories.
A forehead caress wakes me from sleep. A gentle whisper in my ear. My cheek leans in, for her warmth. For her lips.
There’s nothing.
I open my eyes. Curtains from the open window offer a mocking wave before settling down, blotting out the morning light, leaving the room in a cold gray.
Turning from the window I begin to say something but stop. Her sleeping form a translucent memory on the empty mattress next to me. She’s there, but she’s not. I touch the emptiness. I still sleep on my side of the bed.
Her fading memory occupies the other. I don’t want to disturb it.
I tell myself there’s still crease lines from her body in the pillowcase, but I know it’s not true. The moisture of my tears and the heart of my broken heart have long since ironed those creases away.
Pushing myself up, I look around the empty room. Her family moved out all the furniture, leaving nothing but the bed. It was originally hers. But she didn’t want it.
Some days I’m glad they left it. Other days I hate it.
There’s another chill, but the curtains are motionless. It’s not from the outside. It’s from a drained, empty heart.
How does it hurt so much when I have nothing left to give?
Clasping At Dreams
I struggled letting go. I couldn’t give up. Like bucketing out water from a sinking ship, I had to try. I needed to give it my all.
To tell myself I tried everything. Trying everything in vain is still trying. Right?
I’d invested myself into her. My plans, my dreams, my wants, my desires, all included her. Did I try because I wanted her, or because I wanted my dreams?
I clasped at dreams while drowning. Holding onto something invisible isn’t much of a life raft.
We still sank.
Giving Whatever I Had Left
Discovering she had wandered from marriage to another man sheared away part of my very being. It ripped a gash into my chest, leaving my soul to bleed out.
And yet it didn’t instantly stick a dagger into my love for her. It didn’t kill it, extinguish it, destroy it. It remained. A single event couldn’t remove that from my emotions. A wrecking ball won’t take down a building instantly. There’s still a foundation. There’s still memory of how it once looked. I still had the memories. The foundation.
But it’s hard to focus on mending a damaged relationship when one’s own heart and soul are hemorrhaging.
While bleeding out I convinced myself mending “us” would lead to mending “me.” I distracted myself from my own pain, my own shortcomings, by trying to re-forge our bond. Because I needed to keep moving. I needed to feel like I was doing what I could. That I ran the marathon and gave it my all.
We tried spending more time together but were always a wrong-look away from a fight. We tried spending time apart but were always one wrong phone conversation away from a breakdown. We tried therapy. We tried sleeping together, we tried sleeping apart. We tried talking and holding hands and crying and screaming and hugging and running and avoiding and--
We tried to run the marathon.
But sometimes it’s best to stop and take the pebble out of your shoe than it is to keep moving, the pebble cutting deeper and deeper with every step.
Focusing on ourselves and not on each other was the one thing we didn’t try.
And by the end, we’d given everything we had. At least I know I did.
And yet tapped and drained of everything, when the end came, it still hurt. More so than I could have ever imagined.
Every Day
Laying in bed, the empty side of the bed felt larger than ever before. I would reach out and touch it, if only for a second. Afraid that it might claim more of me than it already had. Afraid that reality would set in.
As my body fully awoke, the pain of loss grew in my chest. Like icy vines it sprouted from the empty blackness of my heart, coiling and spreading over my body, it wrapped and gripped me. Some mornings it strangled and consumed me.
After giving everything, how could it still hurt so much?
Probably because I knew giving everything still wasn’t enough.