My Monster, My Ghost, My Love

I’ve heard it said, “Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”

My monster, my ghost, my love – it hurts and haunts and breaks my heart how you manage to be all three to me at the same time. How you manage to be my everything to something to nothing, all before the leaves on our tree change from green to yellow to red – to gone. 

Gone, I see you but you may as well see through me, whenever you even can meet my eyes anymore without the tears you fight not to show me as if that would make you human. 

Gone, I could touch you but you’re so far away even though you’re mere inches from me, you may as well dissolve through my fingers like the fog that now hangs over the paths we walked hand in hand down together. 

But through this fog, I can’t see your hand, its silhouette vanishing into the icy touch of nothingness, cold without the warmth of your palm covering mine from the first frost, possibly colder still if your phantom fingers were to reach out to me now, in the graveyard of our memories – I don’t know if clinging on to that invisible hand would make you, us, real again, or if it would turn me into the fog that gathers still around me and consume me completely. 

Through this fog, I can barely make out anymore the places we’ve been, the memories we’ve made, the next steps we never took now blanketed in oblivion as the possessive mist creeps over the steps we did take, making them hard to see, hard to remember, so hard it hurts to remember what we did. We did, we did. Written on the tombstones of our memories, we did dance, we did clumsily Viennese Waltz over a red carpet of leaves from our tree in a dizzying, delighted heat as autumn melted around us; we did make pancakes dripping with maple syrup, tasting of October and sweetness and all things us; we did kiss under fireworks and a gable in the rain and I could swear it was like the movies coming true. These things were only supposed to happen in the movies, in books, in fantasy because they were too good to be true, but for us, they were good and they were true. 

And they were terrifying. The mere thought of you was enough to give me goosebumps. When I skipped down the stairs to meet you for a date, my heart would be pounding out of my chest as if I were running in a horror movie away from a monster. That monster? The worst one of all. The kind that churns your stomach, makes your hairs stand on end, eats at your heart: love. 

Afraid to fall, I fell for you and you for me until there was no you and me but only us. Through what should have been the dreary times when the days got shorter and the nights colder, I was not afraid because you were my light, my lamp, my warmth. Afraid to be burned, I was not a moth to your dangerous flame: we were both either the moth or both either the flame. Through the phobias of “what if this goes wrong?” nothing about us ever felt wrong, we were so right together. 

Together, together, we did, all we did, all we were, all we were going to be and should have been and – gone.  

My monster, my ghost, my love – you changed. I don’t know when or how, perhaps even you can’t answer that to yourself since you certainly can’t even answer me, but you changed. Call it a vampire drunk on their first sip of blood, a zombie awakened to their distorted resurrection, a werewolf hypnotized by a full moon. Call it simply the human heartbreak of falling out of love but if only there was reason. Any reason, something. You were my everything; when did I become your nothing? This emptiness is more unnatural than any vampire, zombie, or werewolf – before you became my monster, my ghost, you were simply my love and I was yours. No nicknames, no pet names – just, “my love.” 

Everything to something to nothing, you changed, faster than the leaves of our tree changed from green to yellow and by red, I’m left alone with bleeding memories that leave a stain I’ll never be able to wash away, because you may have changed – but I didn’t. 

I didn’t. I haven’t. How much easier would it be to hate you, to hex you, to conjure up that bubbling cauldron simmering with salt of tears and eye of newt with words that should have been our vows translated to an arcane spell. How much easier would it be to cast you out of my heart – my soul – like a demon, like the monster, like the ghost that lives inside me.

I can’t. Okay, can you understand that? I can’t. God, how I try. How I return to our paths, hoping to claim them as my own but keep running into your ghost haunting our trails, your monster lurking behind our every corner. As much as I try to fight it, I loved you – I still do. This feeling won’t go away by the next full moon, and I fear it will never truly go away. I am afraid. So afraid. So afraid that you were all I wanted, all I needed, all that I was afraid to feel because I never thought I had those feelings inside me: to love, to trust, to finally believe there was someone there for me and it was good and true, to finally feel like this is everything. So afraid that this was it, that it was you – and that I’ll never find that again in anyone else. I don’t believe in soulmates, I don’t believe in once in a century types of love – but I believed in us.

My monster, my ghost, my love – you win. Congratulations, is this what you wanted? You win: you won my heart and then you broke this heart I didn’t even know existed before you. If the terms of your victory were losing me, then you win.