The Pain of You

Her hand slipped from mine. So feeble, fragile and cold. Her eyes turned away from me in shame, that same awkward smile dancing over her lips. She couldn’t bear to look at me. 

Her cobalt eyes had frozen over like a lake. There was a time I would have dug away the ice with my nails just to get her back. But now I just let her go, unable to move, to breathe. 

I pictured all the previous fights. The way she had spoken to me. 

There was something nagging on my mind, a voice that had been there for a while now. Of course, I knew what it was, I just didn’t want it to be true.

You are a fool.

My arms were numb, slumped at my side; empty. 

I was alone. She didn’t want me. 

For a second I imagined I had the strength. I chiselled away the frozen plains of her eyes, working until my nails broke. The blood from my fingertips oozed into the abyss I was lost within. It speckled the pristine ivory, tainting, maiming. I lay down, lips turning blue from the chill she had placed in my veins. I couldn’t get through to the peaceful waters I had once known. 

She used to be my saviour, the one who could make it all okay. My rock. An Earth sign as she was.

She stopped loving you a long time ago.

I know, I know, I know. But how was I so blind? To believe she still felt for me as I did for her, was idiocracy. That was vulnerability. That was weakness.  

All those fights I locked away, choosing to believe that she was just hurting from something else.

“Go find someone, be happy.”

Happy?

I couldn’t utter a response. Her eyes met mine again, imploringly. I let her search them, hoping she would see the torment that corroded away at my soul. 

Searching her eyes in return, I saw what I had ignored for so long. She had changed.

She doesn’t care about you. You burden her.

In the glacier wasteland of her irises, I felt my breath come out in a short puff. A little bubble of mist. It hovered horizontally in front of her for mere moments before dissipating. 

I scoffed and shifted from foot to foot, my tongue clicking against the roof of my mouth as I levelled my eyes to her chin and no further. I couldn’t bear it anymore. I didn’t want to see the impassivity in her stares, or worse still, the pity. 

“I have found someone, and they do make me happy.”

She sniggered at my pathetic comment, “you got your next one lined up already?”

“No,” I stammered, hating the slur of my syllables. “No, I meant you.”

She knows what you meant. She’s being cruel. Watching you squirm.

I used to have a fire in my soul and that alone was enough to melt through the glacier. I am an Aries, after all. I burnt with a flame so passionate and fierce that I gave everything I had to the people I cared about. The person I cared about. Everything. 

It was daylight now, but I knew that later tonight I would be staring up at the stars, watching the everpresent glowering of Taurus, a bull stamping upon the ground and preparing to stampede. I would be trampled and the grief would hit me again. An Earth sign through and through she was, a Taurus to the core with her raging stubbornness and the 6 feet of dirt she piled on top of my body, burying me alive in the suffocations of her will. She left me to the maggots and the build-up of carbon dioxide, swallowing up the remaining oxygen. 

She rolled her eyes at me, checking her watch. If I could just make it stop for a second I could figure it out, plan, schedule, and make it all better. We were so in love just months ago. 

Hah!

We were… We were in love!

You’re a teenager. You don’t know the first thing about life, let alone love.

“Maybe we just need to hang out more often, we’ve not really seen each other lately…”

“You know that’s not the issue here. We didn’t fall apart because we weren’t seeing enough of one another. We fell apart and then distanced ourselves.”

I was shaking my head, I didn’t realise it. The scene was so, so distant. I was behind a sheet of glass, watching the ice from her veins ripple out of her body to frost over the window and detach me from what true. The thing those movies never warn you about when your heart breaks is how unattractive it is. Tears gush from the main character’s eyes and thunder booms in the background, a slow violin striking up a melancholy tune. Well, where was my f*cking orchestra?

Where was my silence? Where was the moment the world stopped turning for everyone instead of just mine? Where were all the people crowding around me to make things okay? The headlines on news articles?

I had nothing. 

And why did I have nothing?

Because what I did have, I had given to her. 

“All relationships require work. We were in love once, we can spark that again. Surely.”

It was getting hard to breathe, every movement felt disconnected from my head and my words came out clean-cut and sharp, bristling with desperation. My chest heaved, sucking in a long breath but barely any air passed through my lips. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I heard my mother reminding me to breathe through my nose; mouths weren’t designed for breathing. I closed my mouth and tried to keep it shut. An ache was building in my ribcage. So this is why they call it a broken heart. The tears fell freely down my face and the throbbing in my heart erupted throughout me, I could feel the fragments of my heart torn to shreds and scattered throughout my body. One landed in my throat, tightening into a lump until I was wheezing and letting of whimpers like a kicked puppy. Another landed in my stomach and the ache was so unbearable I could feel it paralysing my spine like I’d swallowed a tiny chain saw that was still turned on. 

To chisel away at that ice would take two people, working from either side to get to each other. But she didn’t want to. She had given up. 

“No.”

“But wh—”

Before she answered, I could feel myself succumbing to hypothermia from the negative temperatures she had provided. I was suddenly so tired, my eyes drooping with tears. I forgot my name, forgot who I was and how to walk, felt so cold and dead inside that everything began to feel warm… and then too warm and I was burning up into a torrent of fire. A full circle it seemed. Now instead of a flaming motivation, the flames would be the death of me. 

“Because I said so.”

And so the bull killed the ram.