the ex who never was

The art of relinquishment, like all worthwhile endeavors, demanded its excruciating apprenticeship far longer than my feeble patience might have expected. But at last, I have learned it, this curious ability to endure the sting of my insufficiency, an insufficiency so deep it seems etched into my very being, eternal, immutable. I smile now, a tragic little curlicue on the canvas of our decay, as if such a gesture could dignify the slow erosion of whatever fragile bond once held us.

He invades my thoughts less now. Even the memory of his hands, my favorite hands, hands I adored, hurts me less. The sickening pang at the thought of them on another, those hands that once felt like the very language of my love, now speaking a new, foreign dialect to someone else, has softened. The pain is less venomous, duller, like a wound that knows healing is futile and resigns itself to existing in mere whispers. Compartmentalization, that clever trick of the mind, has become a plausible remedy. I flirt with new distractions, entertain another, without the unbearable weight of his shadow bleeding into those moments of escape. It took so long, half a year? More, perhaps, for his influence to loosen its grip on my every breath, to no longer occupy my world as if by divine right.

I accept now that he lives in a part of me I cannot evict, but he is no longer the landlord of my soul. A line echoes through this resignation, borrowed from the eloquence of Ani DiFranco: and maybe you can keep me from ever being happy, but you’re not gonna stop me from having fun. It is a defiance, a quiet rebellion against the tyranny of despair, and at last, it feels true.