Hamartia

Fourth

To my lovely Phil,

Do you know what the worst, the very worst part of love is. I don't know if you've ever been fortunate, or perhaps I should say unfortunate, enough to feel love for someone who obviously wasn't me, but either way you might think the worst part of love would have to be the way it consumes your entire soul, the way there is absolutely no escape and you feel every last drop of every little feeling throughout your entire body and the ferocity of it all is almost unbearable and at one point you're sat there wondering if this is hell, this heat, this passion, just feeling this damn much but it's not. The consumable nature of it all isn't even the worst part because, terrible as it can seem, really it's a miracle one small human is able to experience all that, and all at once, at all. A love like that is inescapable, however, and it can be found in every little thing you do, every little thing you say, everything you see and definitely everything you hear. The worst part about love?

It's the music.

When you first fall, because that's all love is for me, falling and falling and never being able to get back up, but when you first fall that's when suddenly all the lyrics make sense. Every love song you've ever heard, it's about them, that object of your affections. That's how it was for me: with every song I'd listen and smile because you were there in the forefront of my mind, my favourite place for you to be. Those moments we'd spend pretending we could sing, belting out the words to songs we only half knew, making up new lyrics to fit when we couldn't remember what came next, dancing around the kitchen and nearly setting the stove on fire because we were too distracted with being happy. Every duet I was singing just for you, Phil, and I was trying my hardest to sing it just right, to make that moment matter just enough you might see it too, instead of it being just me, the enlightened one. Perhaps I should have thought of a better way to tell you I love you rather than the lyrics to Toxic but it was always so entertaining watching you try and fail with that opening line.

Life goes on, however, and the music doesn't stop. We might have grown older, old enough we no longer had the time to mess about to stupid pop songs but the music was still there and so was the love. By the time you'd grown more tired on me, I'd realised how unlikely the dreams of my youth were and was struggling to accept that maybe that meant you'd never quite feel the same way for me as I did you. You may have been my best friend, my only friend, and I yours, but when you smiled at me there wasn't the light I wanted to see in your eyes, there wasn't the happiness anymore that once, just once, I may have kid myself meant something more than it did. You didn't love me but every song was still about you to me.

The day all my hopes were crushed for good was the day you shouted at me. Up until then some small part of me had always longed, even when the rational part of my brain told it to shut up, but that day you'd seemed sad and it was breaking my heart. All I'd wanted to do was make you feel better, just a little if that was all I'd be able to manage, but you didn't even want a little from me. That day you wanted nothing to do with me. Just leave me alone, you'd screamed, turning and running back into your room but not before I'd seen the tears in your eyes. No music in my head would have been loud enough to drown out the sobs heard from behind a locked door.

You were just stressed, I told myself that day, wandering the hallway outside your room, wondering when you might let me back in; we had had a lot of stuff going on lately and I guessed it was just getting to you that day in particular. You never did let me back in your room though, no matter how many times I knocked and I spent the rest of that night reminding myself you were human and sometimes humans just get overwhelmed and need a little space. I'd tried to help but you wanted space and as much as it killed me to remove myself from you, I only ever wanted you happy. If you weren't going to let me be a part of that happiness that was just something I'd have to deal with by default, couldn't be a hypocrite.

The one thought that haunted me from then on, however, was if any small part of you had loved me in the way I needed you to, you wouldn't have blocked me out, you'd have needed me there, you would have done; I needed you here and I loved you. You can't have loved me then, because you left me and now all I have is the music and you're still woven in the melody of every song that graces my tortured ears. That's the worst part, just waiting for the songs not to remind me of you, because somehow it's every song, every time. Songs I've never even heard before, songs that held no significance when you were alive; now all it takes is a few wrong words I listen to and I'm a mess all over again. The lyrics make me think of you and when you're on my mind I can get no rest. All I can do is wonder how you were feeling when you wouldn't let me in, wonder how I'm supposed to feel now, wonder which song to listen to next.

Do I choose happy music in any attempt to distract myself from the pain of not having you sitting next to me, an attempt to fill the house with something other than the somber silence where your laugh used to be. Or do I listen to sad songs, slip into the deep coma of mourning for good? How long must I wait before I'm supposed to try moving on when I've been trying to move on for months anyway. Logically I know there is little point to sitting around forever in sadness, yet anything else seems ridiculously disrespectful, insulting to your memory and I know I loved you enough I will never be happy again.

You've doomed me to a lifetime of silence because otherwise I'm still just putting you and me in every song and it's making everything about your death worse. I want to hate you for leaving, want to hate you for ruining something we both used to find so much joy in, but I could never hate you, Phil. That's the biggest part of the problem.

Forever in love with you,

Your Dan.