I’ve been trying to write. But I find it hard. So instead, I’m reviving old thoughts and emotions, to set these in stone. To remember. To forget. To unravel.

July 2020 –            

I know I should let you go. I’ve been trying. Every day, I think about you and me and where we went wrong. Every day, I imagine you must go through the same thoughts. Every waking moment, I fight the urge to call you and ask, “do you know what happened? Are you still in there?” I deny my impulses for 29 days in a month but by the 30^th day, the thin thread holding me together breaks gently, and I pick up the phone with a sole intention to hear your voice again.

            I exist now in the phone calls you have with me during your coffee-runs. I imagine you sneaking out of the house, on pretext of doing a grocery run, waiting 10 minutes before calling me in the car. I’ve lost my privileges as your first woman and now I’m the ‘other woman’ you must bear with. Now, you’ve made me become the shadow crouching around the corner of your relationship.

            We talk about nothing. You tell me what a psycho she has been, but also tell me that you’ve no regrets. You tell me you feel sorry towards me, and that you will always love me, but not in the way I’m hoping. You want to remain as the good guy, and I let you. I let you because I love you. I don’t know why but I do.

            When the breaking dawn comes, I wrap a shawl around my shoulders. Shoulders I once wanted to show the world. I crave the smell of coffee floating around in our house. I crave the normality of our boring life. And I’ve lost that.

You’ve shriveled my dignity and confidence into a grain of sand – inconsequential. Undeserving. Nothing more than a thoughtless breath.

            And yet, there I bare my soul. Because even as sand, I matter. I would rather matter than be used by you again.