Glorified high ✓

XIV

I didn't dare to go back to your place, not even to move out, because if I did I would've never left. Instead, I asked my roommate to get my stuff from your place and send it to me after I caught a train promising myself never to return to that city again.

I kept my promise.

It's been years, maybe even a decade and I don't know anything about you. I hid my tracks well so you couldn't find me either because I knew you'd try. Maybe you're happy and guilt-free. Maybe you have a wife and a nine-to-five job. Maybe a husband, even though that's something that I only imagined you could call me and nobody else. You didn't do labels but you would do them for me. Maybe you're dead. I grieved you all this time regardless. I grieved the tender, passionate, funny, mundane moments more and the lifetime of them that should have been ahead of us.

But every night it's hard to sleep and every day it's hard to breathe. I'm alone. No, I'm lonely.

I think I was looking for atonement. Running away from you was the best decision I could have made because how could I not live in regret every time I'd look at you? I knew that I wouldn't be able to enjoy happiness bought at someone else's expense. I knew you're not a bad person, you were just blinded by love as I was but the guilt I felt about those unfortunate events undeniably tainted our story. Being in love with someone who was involved in one person's death was a hard pill to swallow but what hit me more was my existence. The reason for your sin was me. I was the catalyst. I brought her in. If only you hadn't loved me so much... If only I had stayed away after that night none of this would've happened.

I never told the story to anyone but I'm telling it now in this book. I can write about you for a lifetime, you know. Maybe writing about you is my last effort to make myself feel better. Because I'm nowhere near being good mentally even though I stayed clean and sober all these years and that's the worst kind of illness when your body is perfectly healthy but you still feel you're dying inside.

This senseless, sad state of mind sucks everything out of me. How much longer will I be able to handle this slow decay? How many more times will I try to scrub my skin raw where your name was written in black marker, rinse my body of your touch? I live in the ruins of our love, my heart still has bullet holes that represent old battles fought and lost but never forgotten. I survived but do you realise you won the war, my love?

I've got everything now, I travel the world and the money is easy, I'm a journalist, reporting from one part of the world to the other, maneuvering time zones just like I always wanted. Yes, I drowned myself in work and I never dared to stop. But my effort has been unfortunate from the start. My heart lies buried away in that same cemetery we once buried her. Where we buried you and me. Wherever my feet take me, wherever I look I see the ghost of you reminding me that in fact, I was never happier anywhere else but in that city when you would land in my arms and I could feel what it's like to be alive, what life feels like. Tangled, slipping hands under your shirt, keeping you where I want you, close, safe, mine, it was then that I realised - until I wasn't loved by you I was never entirely alive.

I never healed. And I'm sure that if I saw you now, you would do that. And I would kiss you like we're young again and I would forgive you your sins because I sinned too. You would forgive me too for leaving you and look at me with a mouthful of forevers. I would intertwine my fingers with yours, tight so I can feel your blood pump in your veins hoping it would somehow mix with mine. You would whisper promises in the darkness of the night. I would admit to you that I wrote novels and poems about the salt of sweat on your skin making the whole world envious of our love. You would hold me like I'm hope. I would use all the words from all the languages I learned to describe the way it feels to have finally, finally found you.

And it will be hard to see you in all your cracked perfection because I would have to admit to myself that's what you are - imperfect and flawed, with scar tissue on your skin and on your soul. But I would accept that because whether it's the days you burn more brilliant than the sun or the nights when you roam the dark alleys of a ghost city broken and poisoned, you are the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. I will love you when you are a sunny summer day. I will love you when you are a violent winter tempest.

I keep running but the city will follow me. Do I bother to hope for a new route, a road that will take me somewhere new where I might find some other version of happiness? Do I return to my King?

THE END