We sat in your car late last night, the heat from your dashboard warming my face. I looked at you and tugged at your hand, a hand which so often grasps mine, a hand which had so often warmed mine while walking down a crowded street. A hand which had been the first show of love between us back when you had waited two hours for me to play my stupid games. You refused to pull your fingers closed around my hand. The hand that was the first part of me to touch you all that time ago, when I tugged at your shirt, the first night our souls touched. Your hand just hung limp in mine, no warmth flowed through it into me. No love flowed where it so often has.
Late last night, I fell onto your shoulder hoping you’d wrap your arm round my waist and pull me close into your embrace. Instead you turned slightly and commented on the smell of booze and smoke that clung to my clothes and breath; the sign of a heavy night trying to get your face from my mind. You lifted your hand to your lips as you faced the window away from me, running a finger over the contours of your lip. I watched as you shook your head. You felt so cold, your hand limp in mine, your breath short and your eyes tracing shadows that danced outside the window which had started to form a film of pale condensation.
Late last night, sitting in your car at the end of my road, I pulled your face to mine. Hoping that our eyes could meet, as they have before. Hoping the things that made you fall for me as often as we lay together under your covers would be able to save me tonight. Instead your eyes met mine and looked right through them. Your eyes, my saviours, which had always managed to pull me in and soothe me; last night they damned me. You didn’t look at me and smile; you just shook your head, causing flyaway strands of your hair to bounce along from side to side. I could take the limp hand and the body that no longer fit like a puzzle piece. But the eyes that rejected me now, they pulled me into a dark room. They pushed me into a corner and locked the door, leaving me to fend off the ghosts of my past on my own. Your eyes had regaled me with tales of your love without your mouth ever forming the words. That second night we had met, your eyes guided me to you. Your eyes, I realise had become my best friends. Your eyes, had been the parts of you which ran over me as I got dressed in front of you, hurrying to leave. They had taken me in so hungrily before, seeing no imperfection. But now they saw only the things I couldn’t give you.
Yesterday you needed me and I left you to fight the thoughts that corrupt and worm their way through your head on your own. Yesterday anger had built up in my baby, anger that I ignored for someone else’s pain. I left you for somebody who had hurt me, an event that you had held and comforted me through. Instead of loving you like I should have, I left you to drown in the vicious undercurrent of reality on your own. Because of this you denied me your wake, the calming tide of your love. I left you on your own to fend for yourself, something I promised to never do.
I’ve sent you others’ sonnets and poems so often, to explain my own feelings. Feelings which belong to the young, because they’re something the old just don’t have the heart for. But late last night your car contained one broken heart and a heart that had gone fishin’. Maybe love like this has finally become too much for you, our age gap finally showing. An age gap which had never mattered to us before as we built our nest out of your sheets and pillows, as we found a home in each others arms. Maybe I’ve let you down one too many times, maybe the comfort you once found in my presence has become a novelty, maybe I’m just not enough anymore. For all your poorly judged words, saying ‘I love you’ was the worst.
Late last night there was only one person who said I love you and meant it. Because the other had already given too much love to the ones that got away before I came along. You had only limited love left for me. The rest of it belongs to somebody else, the person who shared your life before me.
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