idk bro I’m discovery writing
The page sits before her, empty and vast. No matter how hard she tries to fill it, no matter how many crumpled pages decorate the wastebin like the newest seasonal fashion, all she can manage now is the pencil trailing invisible tracks across the margin.
She wonders if, perhaps, this is why some people said love should only exist in storybooks. If maybe some things are simply too big for a person to feel, too colossal and heavy to bear. That, she hopes, is why love collapses.
Why her love collapsed.
Not that it mattered, not anymore. There stood no reason, no search for clarity, that might dull this feeling. Instead, she hoped to take a crowbar to her chest and pry out the pieces of a broken heart and decorate the floor with the shards of failed passion.
This page was meant to be her release, a rush of emotions in one great wave of catharsis that’d leave her empty, so gloriously empty. Then, finally, she might be able to rest.
But her hand refuses to cooperate, grief has taken her by the throat, tight and relentless, and held her still. It forces her to relive the series of failed futures she had hoped for, shown her how her dreams have been slashed and torn. It lets her listen to her own sobs, loud and heaving, like eulogies for all she’s lost.
It’s not fair, she pleads with Grief. It should be different. So very, very different.
It should be, Grief says back. *But it isn’t. *
And it squeezes her tighter.
So she falls to the floor, battered and beaten, and wonders why people love at all. Why anyone would expose themselves to another, to let them take hold of their heart when the best, the absolute best, the world could do was just to crush it.
She wishes that he might’ve lingered at the door a moment longer before he made to leave, perhaps left a scarf behind to show her he had any intention of returning. He hadn’t.
Now, he was gone. In the haze of a rainy night, of a day no one would remember, he had vanished. His flight from her house had been quick, carried on the wings of harsh words tossed at one another like spears in their dimly-lit kitchen.
It had been swift and full of passion, mistakes had been made and now, he was dead.
That was the truth; as clean and clear as it could come out of her. It had been her fault.
Though she did not dwell on the thought for long, with the entertaining of such woes came nothing good.
She abandoned such a frivolous pursuit of reciting the horrible past and fled to the stairs like a sailor in unsteady seas. She takes from the top shelf a bottle of amber liquid, filled with forget-me-nots and bitterness, and she fashions a crowbar of her own.
If the words haven’t come yet, she’ll tear them out. Root and stem.
The page won’t see anything, not tonight.
But it will, one day.
One day, she will realise that even if she had driven him to that cliff, the love between them was there.
It did not change a thing, history could not be unwritten. Too many forces worked against them, perhaps the world itself had vyed for them to be apart.
Their love didn’t change anything, no. But it mattered that it was there.
This is a night of nights, one amongst many, where she takes to the bottle and tries to find comfort in the bottom. It is not the first, nor the last, not yet.
But soon, in a not-so-distant future, she will raise that bottle for the last time. She’ll wonder if there is an inevitably in such things, whether or not all roads had led to where she was now, no matter what she had said or done.
Then she might ponder, on her final sip, if love truly did collapse, or whether something else happened entirely. Perhaps no love is ever truly gone, perhaps she was simply relegated to trading past stories and memories of better times like some foreign currency only she could understand. One she could use as an alibi from all the despair she felt.
Maybe grief and love were intertwined, some pact made on the happiest of days and the saddest of nights.
Maybe, the love lived on in her and it mattered that it was there.
When that realisation comes, only then will the bottle finally come back down and she shall take to the page again.
And she shall heal.