Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground and start over. After the burning, the soil is richer and new things can grow. People are like that, too. I would know.
“Clearly, you think you would know,” you would definitely say.
You’ve thought you were right about me before. But no, not at all, because I still care. That’s why our friendship is gone. That’s why we burned our bridge of connection. Because of your dereliction. The heinous ways you’d speak of me. The monstrous ways in which you’d describe me. The comments. All of them. It hurt. And I couldn’t stand it any longer.
The ashes of our bridge of friendship litter the forest I once knew as “our home.” Our sacred sanctuary where the connection we once had between us used to thrive. Now it lies discolored and dissipated, annihilated and fragmented, triturated and unmendable, an ancient artifact of a friendship long gone. The memories of last year sit stubbornly in my stomach like kidney stones. They scratch at my tear ducts, my eyes burning and teary. The tears threaten to break free from their sealed container. They threaten to race down my face.
I take my time, garnering the remnants of my own bridge of emotions. The bridge I worked so hard to build. The one I took time to stabilize. Our friendship is dead and buried. Thinking back to the past brings along hurt, more than I felt when your actions were a fresh wound. Worse than I thought.
As for you, I’m sure by now that you’ve forgotten me. Forgotten our place. Forgot our secrets. But I’ll be here, waiting. I’ll wait for you to remember. I’ll keep the ashes of my bridge safe, closed in the locket of my heart. But yours will still be here waiting for you. Waiting for your remembrance and protection. But all your ashes are what I got: neglect.
I keep myself afloat, this incommodious, incandescent tide of ashes clutched in my heart’s inviolable grasp, knowing that you won’t be back to gather your own. Knowing you no longer care about what we once had. I let you go. I let it all go.
But the ashes I used to create our friendship remain. I keep them in hopes that I’ll find another person. Another person to share my cares with. Another person to know in the same way I knew you. But it will always hurt, knowing the next person won’t be you.
