Soap suds and lukewarm water, bubbling beneath
soaking dishes
as I clean. Mundane tasks to block out the pain of you and
your words.
A dullness behind my eyes enters and thuds,
a headache
unwanted. It pounds as I scrub and scrape the memory of you and it,
erasing you
from my life before you’ve even
left.
If you’re going then go, leave me with dishes unclean
thoughts turning
over in my head as I play out where it all went wrong. What I
did wrong.
Our tenant no longer resides inside my empty womb and I know
I am blamed.
But my heart too has stopped beating and we cannot be happy
again.
You are prolonging the agony by waiting around,
‘Are you okay?’
Of course not, I’m fading, I’ve drowned.
I play
our summer over in my mind on repeat, rewinding
a broken record.
Beneath cotton and sweat dripping in happiness
melting
into your body as one like we thought we had become.
Moving together
leaving the earth believing we two were the only people on it
only returning
when each forbidden part of skin was loved so thoroughly.
Careless and carefree.
I know every part of your body as it stands, broadly,
blocking sunlight
in the arch of my doorway. Gawking, waiting for my reaction
‘Go, if you’re going’
I say though I don’t really mean it. Instead swallowing syllables
I want to say
choking me as they meet the lump in my throat on the way down
unsaid, unsaying.
He leaves me then, isolated with my thoughts, my silence
He goes
And I remain entirely alone.