Love, Lose, And Repeat

This May Seem Harsh (But Its For Your Own Good)

It's over before you blink, but you can't help but think--in a splurge of sketches etching on your frontal lobe--of how they drove you crazy, and how you liked it, mostly. These people become like--what eyes see, opening, underwater: bubbling, bare outlines. If you stare too long, they'll let you drown down there. Your mind has no sense of time sometimes. It jumps back between Signing your divorce decree, to meeting them for the first time and thinking that was some godly sign, but you'd rather not remember that, or the fights, or the times you stayed up talking until midnight.

 The harder you think the deeper it goes and before anyone knows, you're thinking about the couple you could have been, birthing the twins you would have named Albert and Jen. You ponder wallpaper for the fenced in white house that holds gas-guzzling vans in tented dark. You think of taking your fabricated family out for a picnic in the park.

You can dream all day about the way they lay beside you in bed, breathing quiet life into open air or how they used to say: I love you, leaning into you with good mornings at seven o' clock, but what's the point of that? The souvenirs of thought they slipped inside you while you slept, it all comes back--but they never do.

You take yourself aside to pray it won't be you that this happens to. But blink once and it's on again with different smiles and arms holding you just the way you want them to. You'll tell yourself it's different, this ones not like the last. List the reasons why they let you go, but leave out why your feelings come like thunder, but you let them silence and settled into rain. The cocktailof emotion your mouth mixes your tongue trips over, floods your blood to forget them, but you'd rather not think about that, or your depression, or what Dr. Dan said at your last therapy session.

You let yourself learn the same lessons and always too late. Then, go back to blaming your choices on misguided fate. You're left with this fading fast feeling. Its in a first kiss or a flickering moment of bliss before a goodbye; whether you embrace it with a burly hug or deny it with a tender shove, it still goes on, without consent, the continuing cycle of love.