Mourning us

I don’t think I really mourned us. The loss of the entity that was us. I felt my broken heart for me but not for us.

Because us was something special at one time. We came together to build a life that was full of potential, full of possibility, full of future. There was a “we”. There was an “us”.

But that entity took over our individuality and us became something big and dark and heavy. The potential, the possibility, the future got stuck in the void as we lost ourselves into the expectation of what we should be. We folded ourselves into us and left ourselves behind.

And when it ended, I celebrated the death of us because us had become excruciatingly painful. Us was the entity that ate my soul. Us was something I couldn’t wait to no longer be a part of.

I didn’t see the corpse laying at my feet, battered and beaten and bleeding. I stepped over it and ignored it, pretending that my footprints weren’t left behind in the leftover viscera. I left that empty shell behind and never looked back.

Until tonight.

And finally, I am mourning.

I am mourning the loss of what we built. The loss of forever. The loss of the us that came to be.

I am mourning that there is nothing left between us but emptiness and hollowness and pain.

I am mourning that you are not here. And that I cannot let you be here. And that I can never let you be here again.

I am mourning that we won’t grow old together and see all of our imaginings come to fruition.

I am mourning the death of the love we once surely must have had. That barely a memory of that love has managed to survive. That it wasn’t enough to avoid this inevitable demise.

I am mourning the loss of you and the loss of me. That we gave so much to something that could not survive all the pressure, all the pain.

I am mourning that we didn’t stop long enough to try to avoid the end, that we didn’t see it, didn’t acknowledge it. That we just let it come and watched as the us that was us died.

I am mourning the loss of you because there is still a hole there where you should be. And it will never be filled.

There is nothing now to do but weep and pine and rend something to signify the loss. My heart has worn the rend for a long time but now it has surfaced and become real.

But from the mourning, maybe there can be healing. Maybe it will set me free and let me let us go. I can occasionally lay flowers on the grave. I can occasionally pause to acknowledge the loss. I can maybe finally put us behind me and truly move forward as only me.