Over the last nine months, I have loved somebody very much. I loved them so much that I moved to Japan to be with them; that I refused to write about them or talk about them, in case it made it less real. As if the writing would make them fiction, after so long of feeling like the fiction I wrote was real.
I mentioned a couple of months ago that they broke my heart, but really it was more like the slam on the top of a Terry's chocolate orange: they simply punched the top of it - welded together because of time spent in the fridge, rather than because of essential construction - and have spent the last few months taking away the pieces, segment by segment. The details don't matter, because the details never matter, but they kept going - kept coming back, kept saying sorry, kept saying they loved me too even though it wasn't enough - until it was all gone. Until I realised that all I was doing with my time was touching the bits that were still there and wondering how long I had left with them.
I think they're all gone, now. I think the last piece was taken today, while I sat on the phone to him outside a pub in the rain, staring at the inside of the hat he bought me, and crying. He took the piece, and he said sorry, and I said it was okay even though it wasn't, and then it was gone. He was thorough, methodical: almost surgical, really. And the last piece hurt the worse. I held on to it as hard as I could; I clung to that bloody last piece with all of me, because it's the last piece you need to prove to yourself that you ever had a heart at all. And because - when it's gone - there's nothing to show that it was ever there to start with, except for an empty wrapper and a few crumbs you'll probably throw to a stranger when you're drunk and lonely and missing him.
While he took away the pieces - and did, probably, what a sensible boy does and ate them - I was waiting. Waiting for what, I don't know: for the fragments of utter happiness when he was with me, for the spaces in between when he wasn't and I hurt because of it. To see which bits of me I'd give him the next time he came back; which bits of me he'd take with him the next time he left. And while I was loving, and waiting, and living, I couldn't write. In the last few months, I've written barely a thing. Not a page of a book, not a line of a poem: nothing, apart from the blog that hardly knew he existed. Nothing to do with working too hard, it was about feeling too much: as if the two couldn't exist together. The living - the good stuff - was too alive to write; the falling apart - the Terry's chocolate orange - was too broken for it. So over the last nine months I have lived, and I have loved, I have been taken apart, piece by piece, and - just like many people who spend their time really living, and really loving, instead of locked away on their own - I've written nothing at all.
Now I'm locked away again. He has gone, and I'm back where I always thought I would be before I met him: alone, again, and writing. Wondering how to pass the hours until I really, really understand that he's not coming back. Still touching the air where the pieces used to be, and wishing I had some left to give him, even if just so he could eat them again.
And - as I listen to the sounds of people coming home drunk, happy, and in one piece - I worry whether some people are made to love, and be loved, and others are made to simply write about it.
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