longing

We have learned enough ways to love.

It should have been easy, walking away. We'd spent so much time so close to each other that we'd get pricked by each other's thorns, which, if we weren't careful, would catch and tear and draw blood--and that had been going on for more years than I could count. We gave each other such exquisite scars, and in our lowest moments we knew better than anyone how to comfort each other--there is no greater intimacy than seeing someone who is gravely wounded.

So, full of righteous fury, I left. And though I will tell you until my dying day that I was right to do so, I also began to feel, when the sun had set and I had no company but my thoughts and the cold and the snow, an intense emptiness. Because it wasn't all barbs and thorns, was it? Didn't we sharpen each other, make each other stronger? And I imagined just what she would say, to comfort, to injure--in the end I'm not sure either of us could have even told the difference.

I could have put so many miles between us. Instead I lingered just out of her reach--which, yes, was dwindling by the day--and reveled as rumor of each new setback reached my ears, and longed to be at her side to say the words that would heal her each time I learned that someone else had finally deserted her. And no matter what happened, whether I found solace in the company of some fellow deserter or spent my days alone, I felt just as alone as I know she must have.

It would have overwhelmed me eventually. I pictured that moment so vividly I sometimes thought it was real: the smug look on her face as she mocked me for crawling back, the exact cutting words I would say in return. And, much later, her head on my shoulder as we whispered comforting lies to each other, as though being so close could end in anything but disaster.

Sometimes I wonder if things would have been different if I'd been strong enough to leave, or strong enough to stay.