Loss

We're in the car, and driving home.

My home,not yours anymore and that is its own special kind of pain.

You're talking about the woman you loved, the woman you still crave despite the pain she caused you and the scars you still stroke on nights when the loneliness is too much.

I am sympathizing with you because I have my own scars, my own secret could-have-beens in the middle of the night.

"...it's the most intense things I've ever felt," you tell me, and I shudder in response.

"I've felt it three times," I tell you. "Once for Wolf," whose strong-safe arms are no longer- can never again be- in my life. "And two other times."

I know the intensity you mean. The obsession- and yes, it is obsession. Your brain releases the same chemicals during the early stages of a relationship that are released during an obsessive episode for an OCD person. The craving for them, for their bodies, the meeting with their minds, the brush of their soul against yours.

The fierce craving for their touch, the need to touch them, to mark them and show the world that they belong to you, that they love you and they are yours and you are theirs and yes!

"You're lucky to have felt it so many times," he tells me.

I glance at him, pretty and dark and hurting. I know what he means- that I am lucky that having felt it more than once, I know I can feel it again. Know that the loss of it once is not the loss of it forever. But the words won't come past the lump in my throat.

"You get past it," I tell him. "You go to bed hurting and you wake up hurting and you go through the motions hurting- eating and drinking and working and playing- and you know it won't ever go all the way away but you hold on to the little things, the little pleasures."

"It's different for you," he says. "You have someone."

"It's not like that," I respond. "It doesn't make the pain less. But you cling to the little things. The taste of tea in the morning, the rush of caffeine in your body. The taste of chocolate on your lips. The accomplishment of learning a new skill. It doesn't take away the pain, but it makes it bearable.

"And when you think you can't stand it anymore, when you think you're going to call them in the middle of the night, you remind yourself why they're not there anymore. Why they're gone, whether they chose it or you did. In the middle of the night, you hold on to anger or hurt or fear or whatever it takes to remind you because sometimes they're the only things that are stronger than the craving for them."

After all, foolish boi, how do you think I keep from calling you?