Part Three... Of Me Poem by Jeffrey Brown

It's when the silence hits that it starts to hurt

The feeling alone you were supposed to protect me from when you said 'the rest of my life with you'

The brutality that is the honesty of who I am is all that I have to consider now.

The honesty of the brutality of who you have become is so inconsiderate I simply try to pretend I am wrong and that I think these things to protect myself.

Logic steps in and makes me answer the question 'who protects themselves by hurting themselves with things that are not happening? '

So, again, with no more answers from you, I am forced to make the questions fit the person-ality

There is no discussion of these questions with you in person, all you know how to do is tune me out.

There is no assurance from you that things will always be OK.

There is nothing that comes from your lips that does not accuse me.

There is so much pain in catching myself staring angrily at the
phone. The words I want to say to you designed in my ruptured mind to make sure you take some of my pain regardless of the pain you already own.

The pain you own.

There is nothing I can say or do to equal the pain inside of you that has been there a long time before I met you.

The pain you wont roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty facing it as you clean the wounds in your soul.

You choose to bury your pain never realizing how much escapes its shallow grave, seeks out, finds and joins hands with my fear.

These new friends, strengthened in numbers, can be seen happily playing together in the amusement park of our lives if you look hard enough.

If you would look at all.

I know in the sane parts of my heart that even though I feel like I am the only one suffering, and even though you are so easy to see as enjoying yourself without me, you are hurting inside too.

Not necessarily because I am gone.

Not necessarily because you no longer have the important parts of me; trust, respect, a willingness to do anything for you.

No, if for no other reason, I know you share my pain because you now have to clean off the dust that remains as an outline on the shelf you had put me on, to avoid seeing my loss so clearly. So others don't see the missing part of your life so easily, just in case you decide to make them a spot in my old place.

This extra housecleaning too will find itself in the vault of things you blame me for. It will to you appear as arrogance on my part. Who the hell am I to not sit on my assigned place on the shelf? How dare I want from you? Who do I think I get to be in your movie other than the character you direct from your chair, your bed, your script of lies?

I hope someday you will understand how horrible for me it has become to think so horribly of you.

How much I hate to hate you this much.

To see the truth and how little of it you gave me without tearing apart the lies you tried to hide it in. Each rip was necessarily a blind cut in the fabric that wrapped us together and kept us warm. Each shred lying in piles at my feet, a reminder of just how much I wanted to believe in something that was not sewn together with strands weaved in reality. Just like the new clothing worn by an Emperor long ago, simply a trick played on a man that overestimated his importance.

And I absolutely must have thought too highly of myself to feel this low without you.

I just hope the freefall is over and that my parachute has deployed. Right now I am too afraid to open up my eyes again.

Too afraid to look at the stripped, barren parts of my life that our ending has provided as fertile ground to start again. Afraid of how vast and expansive such an area must be. The ensuing vertigo it will bring with the thought of the rebuilding it will take. The nausea at the cost to replace such an immense amount of loss.

Yet there are even worse, darker fears that scream and spit and laugh cruelly in my face.

The clenching of my eyes shut so tightly has caused me to break out in a cold clammy sheen of sweat.

The fear that my opening eyes will find nothing. A void created by the existence of emptiness where I believed your love of me would be.

That would announce with all finality that everything thought we were, had, said, felt... was a figment of my imagination....or that I have found my true self, insane.

Onward, my third day of a life without you ensues. I have not contacted you today... I want to so deeply... but I won't. This time I won't. I won't. Even as I say this I know I am only attempting to convince myself...