by Ashley Love
My world had come to an end.
He was my world…and now he’s gone.
When I step out of the shower my legs are wobbly and unstable. My whole fucking existence is unstable. It’s really over.
I’m alone…and it’s over.
I feel alone but when I shuffle into the bedroom I am immediately slapped with the evidence that he was here, his black boxers still discarded at the foot of my bed, half tucked under the comforter that’s barely hanging onto the mattress, the sheets still a rumpled mess as we left them. If I weren’t fresh out of tears I would cry a few more.
From the outside I imagine it would seem weird to watch myself cross the room, to see my hands lift the fabric from the bed. If I didn’t know me I would think I was crazy. Maybe I am. Maybe I’m crazy but he just left and I already miss him and I just want him here, I need to feel close to him. These are the things no one admits doing in the midst of an emotional calamity such as this. This is the wife putting on her husband’s shirt after she throws him out of the house, even if it smells like another woman. This is the desperate quest for comfort that knows no bounds of sanity.
I slip the fabric up my legs, the rest of me still naked, and I’m comforted somehow. In some sick way he’s not so far gone. When I peer down the hall I see a lump of rumpled fabric on the floor. I walk slowly toward it, quiet steps padding against the carpet until I recognize it as one of Lex’s hoodies. I scoop it up, pressing it to my chest and in an instant I’m back in that cold rehab bedroom, that same nagging feeling of loneliness tugging at me like it always does when he’s not around. I’m also hit with that same dread that I have to give something up…but this time it’s not the drugs.
I tug the hoodie down over my body and flip the hood up over my hair. It hangs to the middle of my thighs and for a moment I wonder why in the fuck he won’t just buy clothes that fit him. Then my exhaustion kicks back in and when I look back down the hall into the bedroom I can’t even bear to think of laying in that bed after last night. But my body is so tired, I need somewhere to rest. I want those moments to linger in that room for as long as I can stand them, if for no other reason than to convince myself that it was real, what happened last night. So I turn to the couch.
The wrinkled sheets still carry his scent even though he didn’t sleep on them the night before, and I curl into them, curling into him and trying to push the thought away that he’s gone now and I have no one to tend to, to worry over, to consume my thoughts with other than myself.
It’s time to take care of me now, but part of me just isn’t ready.
