Full Circle Sunset (The Sunday Muse, 256)

 

She said it best as she turned and departed into the winter night. Those words, chilling as they were, also, warmed me, as they digested in my suddenly sober mind. They replayed, each time seemingly adding a new layer to their structure until I felt in my heart what she meant. Our time was done. The love still lingers in the far corners of our hearts, but like peeling wallpaper our patterns no longer met at the edges. The cute had long ago turned into endless thorns against our skin, punctured partners unwilling to apply the simplest of ointment to sooth the maddening moment. It had not always been an uphill struggle in a dark night of continuing storms that buried any hopes and dreams under dizzying heights of frozen baggage. But her luggage’s imprints could now be traced to her car, filled with tears and sobs, her foot lifted from the ground and the door closed one last time.

Hers was a difficult decision. To stay and watch me drink myself into the littered landscape or walk away, never knowing if I quit beginning to write again. To give up upon the one shared dream of our paradise, paved with sandy fantasies of umbrellaed rum and butt imprints on the beaches. I could not blame her for all her own faults, even the ones that led me to drown from the inside out. Instead, a wave of pity flooded my fermented mind, reminding me of catching her with him far too many times. Now, he was dead, we all were in our own ways, and she was gone, long gone in this fresh physical minute.

Many years had passed, the book was being made into a movie and my days were filled with watching a stranger take my words and turn them into fodder for the masses. I no longer cared, I just sipped tea and nodded when asked if I had meant a certain emotion for a group of words clearly designed to convey the obvious. All that mattered to me was getting through another day so I could drive away and follow the sea to where she and I would make butt prints against the setting sun.