To My Guru

His tears had become memories, and his memories had become dry and fractured.  As he looked at her one last time, he could only muster one final, broken question:  "But when will I heal?"  I didn't have the heart to tell him that sometimes you don't.

To my Guru:  

It is months after I decided to walk away and I am done crying.  Life doesn't feel like it's underwater anymore.  I can laugh without your name feeling like a splinter in my lungs.  Sometimes I go days without wondering where you are.  I can hardly taste you.  I call this letting go.  Announcing that it is over, at last! I've shouted from the rooftops about how I closed and bolted the doors to him once and for all.  Ten years, down the drain.  My support, my confidant, my lover, the vault that held our secrets, dead to me.  Walking away from you even after I knew it was time felt like I had chopped off my left arm;  and all I got from you was crickets.  That in itself was enough.

Please go to Hell in a pretty pink handbasket with a polka dot ribbon.

Keep your prayers.  I make my own luck.  I'll remember you, the man who loved me the most at my worst.  The pillow I could lay my head on.  I, the woman who set you ablaze.  I won't talk about the windows left unlocked.  The tiny bit of hope that maybe, we were wrong.

Looking back, you were a whole lie but the truth is that I loved you anyway. I loved you bold enough to print your name on paper and you, my darling, could not even whisper my name into an empty room.  I truly believe you thrive on destroying me piece by piece.  The best part was waking up on Christmas morning to find that I had been deadass lied to for four months.  Engaged, to someone that I didn't even know that you were seeing.  

I'm opening the chest wound because it's time now, and I'm leaving. For better or worse I can't find the words to say anything else about what happened.  I would have painted you stories with these words - promises true, and absurd.  I would have pulled the God damn sun right from the sky for you.  

Ain't I just a bitter girl that stopped living after you played dead and I chose to leave?  Ain't I just a sad thing, over there?  Ain't all these poems about you?  Ain't everything about you?  Every time I got asked why do I write, I should just say your name, right? Any article written about me should just be titled "The Girl He Didn't Want Anymore".  My book when I write it - that is going to make me a millionaire - should have your name on every page.  You made me famous, didn't you?  Made me so broken that it gave me something to tell all the lonely girls, a piano to play them a song to sleep to.  You get all the credit, the glory.  You get to tell that story.  I loved you and you didn't love me back.  But I told you the night you asked me to stop writing about you, every poem that I write is about me.

Whomever this new woman is, I pray she sees you for who you are.  That she leaves sooner than I did. Don't worry, the truth about who you really are dies with me.  After all, what are best friends for?  I hope she never fills her art with your name.  I hope that she is beautiful and makes you forget all about me.  That you'll never read this because you have.  She is my blessing come to set me free of you.

Bless this pain, the knot in my throat thinking of your face the first time you saw me walking into that Irish Pub on the corner.  Bless this grief, the years that I gave you.  Hundreds of hours talking.  Bless this sweet nothing.  This, absence.  If I had not loved you I would not have known what it is to stop fearing love.  Bless this pain that I earned.  Sometimes, it's not what was wrong that bothers us.  Sometimes what bothers you the most is that it never was right, and for a time, you didn't know the difference.

In other words:

FUCK OFF.

Then keep fucking off.

Keep fucking off until you get to a gate with a sign saying "You can't fuck off past here."

Climb over the gate, dream the impossible dream, and keep fucking off forever.  

And for the record, I didn't say that I want you to die.  I said that I still care about you enough to want to make sure that your trip to Hell is a nice one.

Sincerely, Hurricane Jessica