Love Doesn’t Die Alone

It feels like I'm falling slowly from a burning building. Someone pushed me out the window. Thank God, who wants to stay inside a crumbling structure engulfed in flames? People say there's a net waiting to catch me, but I can't see it, so I'm afraid. What if they're lying?

I told a lot of lies. Not recently, but over the years. I stopped lying 180 days ago. Lying to others, that is. I lied to myself yesterday. They also say denial is part of the grieving process. Is it foolish to label what I am feeling as grief? There are folks out here dying, leaving behind families. Those people grieve. Should I?

I wrote a poem today:

I might have loved you forever
From that Lowcountry summer
Until the faded last breath
But love cannot survive on itself
It needs nourishment
Warm embrace
Kept out of harm's way
It gets dulled by minutes of betrayal
Beat down by days of complacency
And it pushes you to hang on
Until each cut digs deeper
Clinging to what it once knew
What it once was
And longs to be again
Before you shoved it away
Before it became an afterthought
Taken for granted
Like a mindless task to fill up time
Love doesn't die alone
We kill it

This death is slow and painful and penetrates my eardrums and makes my skin crawl like the sound of felt tip markers scraping copy paper as our son aggressively colors entire sheets, one after the other.

He says things like, "I bet dad thinks she's hotter," and it becomes clear why kids shouldn't be privy to dirty divorce details.

On Monday, I called her at her day job, a Methodist College in a neighboring county. I wanted to warn her that he's sick in the head, maybe save her some heartache, though she's undeserving. But, instead, she screamed, "how do I end this call," frantically to whoever was in earshot before I could get a word in. Then, she called the campus police on me.

He later told me that she typically isn't so petty and immature but was "shook."

I replied, "Maybe if you hadn't victimized yourself as someone drowning in a loveless marriage to garner her sympathy and make her fall in love with you like some guileful comic book villain, she would've expected my acrimony."

The night it all went up in flames, my friend Megan sent me a text that said, "love hurts. There's a song about it."

It hurts like hell. That's why we like it so much. Adrenaline. Dopamine. Serotonin. Oxytocin. We all just want to feel something, don’t we?

Sometimes we become addicted to releasing those happy little chemicals that usually lead to hurt, and nothing else matters, not even conviction.

It is falling in and out of love and falling from burning buildings. It's learning to trust the easiest person to lie to, yourself.