A Severed Flower

          Heart•ache: noun.

Emotional anguish or grief, that is typically caused by the loss or absence of someone loved.

It sounds so simple when you put it that way, doesn’t it? Almost easy. As if my heart is simply longing for the touch of yours and not breaking every time I glimpse a reminder of what used to be. You will never receive this, and it will never reach your ears, but I hope you know that your name falls from my mouth seldom these days. Some days I can even claim that as a comfort. Others, it is nothing more than a stabbing reminder of who I have become and who I have lost; a relic from the past I have no claim to and yet my tongue still remembers the touch of. It tastes brittle, hesitant, and mesmerizing.

Isn’t that a mark of progress though? I no longer cling to the hope that you will return. I know you are gone. Even still, I can tell you the exact day I left. Truthfully, my memory is not as hazy as I claim it to be. How do I tell you my mind was gone long before my feet slipped through your door, long before I thought about the pain of being away from the warmth of your bed and the softness of your lips? How exactly do I explain myself? You deserved more than my war torn body could give you. it’s shadow casting a glow I cannot yet bare to see.

That is not to say I don’t remember the hues of yellow that poured through your window as I took my bag and slipped out through the front door for the final time. Or even now as I remember the way your body fit so neatly against mine. No, rather it is to familiarize myself with what taking the heart you gave me and squeezing the life it gave.

Part of me knows that I deserve your anger, but another simply wants me to beg you to stay. To forgive, even if I no longer deserve those words. My mistakes were my own folly, and I will forever be taking repentance. My knees will be stained from praying to the shrine of your memory but god, I would taste the sea and drown in its depths for just another glimpse of you—an old lover, the sky’s parted bliss.