ON MY FAILURE

MY HEART TO YOURS We had been married thirteen years. We had two daughters aged four and one year old. I had no idea what she wanted to talk about that day. We went into our bedroom and closed the door. There were no traces of any hatchets, but by God one was about to fall. I only heard the first few sentences before the room went silent. Her lips were moving but the words made no sound. The echo of my heart was beating in my empty skull. I started counting the beats, as a cold invisible sweat rolled down my brow. My body was drowning in an unforgiving ditch of sinking mud. The atmosphere was a sandpaper grating against the grain of my senses. I know my lips were moving too. I gather we were speaking. Even the chair I was sitting on betrayed me as it plugged itself into the wall. There was no call from the governor. The sentence was death by a lethal injection of ‘it is over, I want a divorce.’ My wife of thirteen years ended our relationship that day. It would be the last time our skin would even brush against one another. If love is bliss, if it is the light then unrequited love is the switch that extinguishes the Sun. Everything we had built in over a decade was finished in just minutes. “I am not in love with you,” repeated itself in the annals of the entire universe. Surely, the planets were no longer aligned; the stars must have lost their brilliance that day. At least the traffic must have stopped and the economy crumbled worldwide. Was Earth still on its axis? Did gravity not fail us? Not as much as a mosquito bite was affected that day. All was as it should be. Life was as fine as rain, the day my world stopped spinning and fell off its axis. The day gravity released my body and the free fall that ensued. I was stripped of flesh, raw, completely exposed to the ravages of the elements and no one cared. I cried that day, I cried until I could cry no more and then I cried again. I cried everyday for the next five years. Everyday I would mop up the puddle of blood I stood in. It would stick to my shoes and glue me motionless to the floor. I was incapacitated by the bleeding the daring of all my yesterdays. That was my today and there was no tomorrow. There is no pain like the rejection of the love of your life. I was monogamous then and I am monogamous now. One life, one love. It took me another two years to stop crying completely and another three to grow a new spine. Finally, a person I was ready to love again. I was ready to meet my one. It was, it is a brand new day and I am searching for my one love. I think I have found her, time only time will answer that question again. It feels good to be alive. It feels good to smell the flowers in the rain. armandhamouth