Break up. It’s the worst. How often we’ve heard that! The sadness. The tears. The breaking heart like  glass cracking. We’ve all been there. We think we’ll never heal. We do. We go on.

There are sunny days, fragrant flowers, hand-holding, muchness.

New partners. New lovers. Newness.

The worst? Let me introduce you to death. It snatches. It grabs. It removes. What you loved is no longer.

It’s not that they’ve moved out or taken up with a younger woman or an older man or a new owner with better kibble.

They’ve been scratched out.

Maybe for a moment before their body is removed, you can hold on. Just a second until you feel the stone coldness seep from them to you and realize that everything that made up that relationship will exist only in memories and photographs and silken or angry or arbitrary words that you composed because that’s what you do.

There’s no tantalizing idea of a phone call, drunk dial or not, but maybe a call to hear their voice one last time (or multiple melancholic times) or watch the video of the pup that you took accidentally because you didn’t realize you were no longer just taking photos.

You move on. Time softens the edge, but the edge still remains. It’s a different kind of breaking up. A shattering of the heart. A stilling silence. Irreversible loss.

end

(c) Sascha Darlington