Irrelevant strangers

I am sitting across you unable to keep eye contact. I feel your eyes on me, looking at me, willing them to stare back into yours so you can see what your words are doing. My ears are listening to what your mouth is saying but it is becoming confusing as for each sentence and phrase my mind creates another and I am obliged to listen to you both.

This isn't working, you say, you need some space to find yourself but my head is also asking if it isn't working because of her, if you are finding yourself with her. Somewhere along the conversation I realise I have lost you, it must have been somewhere between the 'Its not you, its me' and 'I hope this does not affect our friendship and our business'. I want to laugh at this point but fear how it would look. I feel you waiting for me to burst into tears and honestly I'm waiting for it too. It's funny as I watch us both destroy so quickly what we've built in the last decade. I see beyond your shoulder to Daddy's 'I told you so' and Mummy's shocked look as she realises I might not need the dress after all.

When did we become irrelevant strangers, you and I? When did we stop caring? When did we stop listening and touching and noticing? When did we stop speaking? When did summer's heat become winter's freeze? When..

But you cut through the conversation between myself and I and I hear you tell me how it will all be ok because I am so strong, one of the things you loved most about me you say as you get the bill and I realise we are using past tense already. The evening is over and so are we. I open my mouth to speak but can't will my lips to separate. Pride prevents the tears from falling, at least on the outside! At the tube station, I convert the embrace to a perfunctory handshake as you head west and I east, signalling our future, travelling in opposite directions.

I laugh then because I feel I can but then it comes; that pain that goes from my chest to my belly in the fraction of a second. It is then the tears start to fall. The tears speak, telling me I am human and externalising my pain, what they fail to tell me is that they will never stop, at least not for months to come.

Xoxo