the end.

The devastation is complete.

Gone

He left. He left me He left us. He walked out with his duffel bag in hand. The distance from our relationship grew exponentially with every step towards the door.

His broad back looked and moved as it had for years, his gait identical. Yet the person was no longer the same. His essence was empty. Devoid of the primordial energy, the cloud, the complex web of connection that hovered between us like a soft fog. The air surrounding him was no longer ours. The awareness of the loss was instantaneous, sucking the breath from my lungs in a long, painful final gasp.

I could only see my past present and future leave as the door clicked closed behind him. He left behind nothing except everything that was us.

Hope

The hope sprung up immediately adjacent to the abject pain of loss. Intertwining with it, its sticky tendrils spreading into every corner of my devastation, rooting deeply across the decaying field of our dead relationship.

Poisonous in its promises for a future that would never exist, hope only grew. But only hope. Just hope. Absent of any substance. Nothing to grow in or on. Feeding on pure fantasy, nourished by the bare remnants of what was.

Pain

I hurt. Fine strands of white-hot pain pierce and weave, tangled around every fiber of my being. Beyond count, each one burning through living tissue, leaving only scorched black lines of graying ash.

I am fracturing along every line, breaking. Pieces of who I was peeling back, flaking, sloughing off into dust. Revealing an emptied shell of a stranger taking my form.