Speaking with some assuredness which I have gained through years of experience, I am justifiably helpless in the matter of the nearly sentient thing which we and the others around us refer to as a relationship. No one quite knowing how to define it in terms we can understand, no one prepared to allow it to be anything outside of the norm. And yes, I include both you and I when I speak of the masses.

I may feel something for you that is outside of my standard range of emotions but it has not caused the cataclysmic reaction in me as it seems to have caused in you. Outside of my head, it all makes sense. And there in lies the difference. Where I may hide away for days on end or become closed off and withdrawn from the responsibilities of societal niceties, you will lash out at the nearest target with the harshest words and actions you can conceive of. I understand. You are trained to kill and to break and perhaps it would give you a certain amount of satisfaction if I admitted to you that I have been thoroughly broken by you. Not to a point where I am irreparable, yet to a point where I have given up on regaining what I had with you in those first few weeks.

Each sentence I write down has the desire to be begun with the word I, and yet I am painfully aware that it is you and we and everything except I on which I should be focusing. You are not used to fighting for a relationship. Not prepared to drag your lover back kicking and screaming in order to extract a complete breakdown of the reasons they left you. Not ready to wait, to not put up masks and say that it doesn’t bother you at all. In retrospect, I should have known this about you. However no one has ever accused me of looking into the future, only the past.

Don’t you know, I never make mistakes? If I did, that is what I might call you, and yet the fact that we slept together even after it was over must say something for my correctness in choosing you. And those nights were the hardest, lying with you curled up in my arms, the only times you ever allowed yourself to be vulnerable as we shared a bed yet not a common love.

And yes, there are complexities in this, in us and everything between us that has remained unsaid that could create this emotional inadequacy I seem to be struck with every time we try to be emotionally open with one another. I can not say that it doesn’t hurt me because in saying that, I would be presenting you with yet another lie for you to add to your arsenal of reasons that we shouldn’t be together. I say I know what you’re talking about when I haven’t got the foggiest. I apologize for things I don’t know I’ve done merely to preserve this fragile and seemingly so fleeting fragment of peace we have found ourselves balanced upon for, at the least, this particular moment in time. My aim was never to cause you pain, only to protect myself from the pain that everything you have said and have not said will bring me and in doing so I know I have, unintentionally, perhaps caused you more pain in the long run than you have given to me.

We have become so intertwined in the fallacies on which we rely so heavily for our psychological and yes, spiritual, wellbeing that we have lost track of the greater picture. The proverbial demon, devouring us from the inside out until there is nothing left but bitter, empty shells in the places where we once stood, living and breathing the passion that feeds the demons, that spurs them into action. The all consuming flames of hell beckoning us forward, and he stands at the river and asks us for our singular gold coin but we don’t have it. Perhaps forgotten in the flurry of packing for the after life, or perhaps we are destined to be eternally trapped in limbo, dancing on the edge just as we seem to do already in each action we take, each word that is spoken be it in anger or love, that seem to blend together. Mountains will crumble, long after we’ve turned to dust.