love is a losing game
It was easy for you. At least that is what I thought. Easier for you than it was for me. Only I can see inside my mind, feel inside my being, suffer the way I suffered at the mercy of your detachment. You let go when I was hanging on for dear life. Not that I was quiet about it, you knew. My agony made no difference to you. No tear shed, no words said, no intervention could have changed it; I know that now. Hindsight’s twenty-twenty is no comfort given what I had to uncover for my vision to become so clear. I guess that is what they mean by ‘ignorance is bliss.’ Ignorance is bliss only when you have hindsight to compare it to. Who is winning now?
The push and pull of the threading that so inextricably wove us together was exhausting. Did you know that catching up on sleep is meaningless when sleep is the escape? And even in slumber sorrow burdens the soul. How could one be so ever-present and unconscious at the same time? Trust me, the two can coexist. Even harmoniously after long enough.
Can you believe people do this willingly, as we did? Hopefully tie their knots together ignoring our shortcomings, or better yet, fooling each other into thinking we are accepting of them. The real MVPs are the ones who vow to never let the knot disintegrate, because those people endure the thunderstorm and do the work to clean up its mess. No one wants a medal for that, but we are praised, nonetheless. We are all sadists, I guess. Sacrificial lambs offered to one another by none other than us. That makes us sound looney and we are not looney. We are educated and fiery with passion about the right things. You know, the right things. As in everything that is left.
I am done with making pain sound artistic. Hiding behind words you have to decode to understand me. That is how we got here in the first place. Because you could not understand my words no matter how often I scrambled them into a language that you could digest. That is not meant to be a dig. I love you and I am just being honest. Honesty is a losing game too. I am not even trying to win. Are you? I just want to exist in love, with you, and without the haunting of what you did.
You see, I only vowed to tie my knot to yours. To make a new knot otherwise known as ‘us.’ So, when the encrypted messages left my lips to rot in your subconsciousness and the edges of our knot began to fray, I was not prepared for you to intertwine with another being. Our knot was loose, yes, but is that not what we signed up for? To jump in rather blindly and promise to have each other, and only each other, for eternity? Did we not agree to endure complete agony solely for the reward of having someone to love? Only agony is not what you endured; rather, agony is what you escaped, leaving me standing alone with a tattered rope and your seed sprouting in my belly.
How does bathing in the sun feel now that I am privy to what lured you away from the storm? See what I mean about hindsight? How easily winning starts to feel like losing once you understand the rules. Never again can we bask in the illusion of uncomplicated love; but at least now we are playing the same game.
