Therapy take two

Tentative title. Another attempt at therapy. I will heal, even if it is the last thing I do. I have decided to dedicate to healing. In the same way I decided to love you in that way that writers do - with too much drama, too little denouement. I have decided to let go, opening one finger at a time and turning my palms upwards. I will heal and receive. And this is the way I will go about it. I will write you into the past until I will only be able to find you scratched into yellowed pages with faded ink, nostalgia my friend and a heart that is whole.


This is not my choice. This is your choice. This is the option you left me with.


I am stripping myself down, layer by layer. I am laying myself bare. I am writing naked. This must be some kind of poetic justice, I suppose. Writing naked. Just like I let you see me.

I stripped myself bare, crawled out of my clothes and laid myself before you, in nothing but skin and insecurities. I loved you naked, the way I used to love my words naked. The way I try to love my words naked again. I loved you like a good poem.

And you loved me like a good past-time.


Two hundred and ninety eight days a relationship.

Two hundred and ninety eight days.

Two hundred and ninety eight reasons to be torn up.

Two hundred and ninety eight fractured memories.

Two hundred and ninety eight hollow feelings in my stomach.


I try not to regret. I do not want two hundred and ninety eight regrets. 


But, maybe, just maybe, we should have stayed convenient fuck buddies. You should have used my body and left my heart alone. I should have never gotten attached. I should have left room for the inevitable - left room to wiggle out when the earth caved in on me. I should have left you alone - me, with the reverse Midas touch; you, our relationship... maybe merely fools gold... and so me, the fool - and not turned everything to shit.


Today, one of my greatest friends taught me an important lesson with her experience - and her blogpost - today. The lesson was that some people are roots, and some are branches. The roots take hold and stick around during the rain and the snow. The branches, and the leaves, linger through the spring and the summer and are gone when it gets rough. Do you know the leaves from the roots? I didn't. But now, now I do. I know about leaves.

Forgive the cheesy play on words.

People leave.

But sometimes they don't just leave. Sometimes they quit. Sometimes they quit when you still have fight left in you. Sometimes they leave a mess behind.

I am the mess you left behind.


I am naked. And writing. I am learning to lay myself bare for myself alone. I am stripping out of my insecurities, and even my skin. I will shed this skin that you have owned for two hundred and ninety eight days, touched for three hundred and eighty two days, claimed and stained three hundred and fifty three days ago. This skin must forget three hundred and eighty nine days and counting - since this skin decided to welcome you back.

This skin has one thousand, six hundred and eighty two days of you. Or four years, seven months, one week and one day of you.

Do the math.

This skin, you will realise, has much to strip.

Count the pieces of me that I have left behind. Left with you. Cannot collect in a box at your door, with teary goodbyes and begging to be loved again.

I will not give myself again to love that opens me up and empties me out. I will hold out for the love that opens me up without emptying me out - if such a love exists.

I am naked, empty, still writing.

Naked, empty, writing and making no sense. I chose you over my words, and now they refuse to be taken back.

And you, you will not take me back.

And I, I will stop wanting you to take me back.


I will shed this skin. I will be naked. I will strip you from my skin and stop smelling you, tasting you and remembering you. I will write until my fingers bleed and my heart heals. You had no fight left, and me, I will redirect my fight and fight for myself.


Naked. Empty. Writing.

Naked. Empty. Writing.