Wall

I can’t seem to make myself realize that this relationship will never return. Despite the countless times she utters, “I just don’t feel that spark that I used to,” or, “I just can’t think of you in that way,” I continue to throw bits of myself at the intangibility of love; however, I’m becoming more whole than I have been in quite some time. The love I still feel for her powers me, the huge crush I have on her still motivates me, but it’s the futility of the conversations I have with her, the same rock thrown against the same wall with the same hope that maybe, just maybe, this new angle will bring the beautiful thing down and I can finally come home.

The conversations themselves don’t give me hope that we will be together—the fact that she knows these talks are coming and she makes no effort to squash them gives me the real hope—but they do make me feel human. As I ramble to her from my cross-legged perch on my freshly made bed, as I watch her eyes go from beautifully made to puffy and red, not letting a single tear fall yet, I can’t help but feel like I’m really here, really in this world, really having an impact. But, it’s not me doing it, is it? Is it not the feelings themselves flowing between the two flesh statues that make one cry and the other realize? But then again, it is me—I am my love.

I love it when my emotions make her question her feelings. To see the first tear whisper a coarse “What if?” as it scrawls a wet line through her foundation before it is silenced by her soft, white hands makes my heart soar as fast as it plummets. I feel like those tears should make me hurt instead of soar, but I have no way of knowing how she feels. Do her tears make her feel as I do, as part of something much greater than either of us? Do they make her heart leap and plummet as she feels the unending compassion of another soul and wishes so desperately that she could love him as truly as he her? Or does she just wish she were anywhere else, telling herself over and over that she doesn’t want this drama and she just wants to be away from it? I can’t know.

I can only then wonder: “Are these talks, these tears, chips in a wall keeping us apart, or mortar over the cracks in the wall she built keeping me out?” There’s no way to tell this close to the thing, but I’m too compelled by what’s on the other side to back away and look for myself. And yet, if I were to step back, would I see a wall, or would I see a woman, with all her beauty, all her intelligence, all her grace and find not a denied future, but a new friend?