I am haunted by the twenty year old pictures. I’m smiling of
all things. The sun setting behind makes artwork of the sky. Climbing harnesses
say we topped out after three pitches at Table Rock. Oh, how times were different.
I ache in looking.
These pictures somehow tear my chest from my heart. I do not know how to hold the two emotions together in one
space. Love. Confusion. Pure giving altruistic love, for you, the narcissist. And yet, your love was absent. Faked, perhaps.
I do not know what to do with that, now.
Was it always absent? Always faked, or did it somehow morph into this absenteeism--this wretchedness?
How can my love, not have changed or influenced you, even ever so slightly? How
can it be that you find it so easy to hate me? How can it not be difficult to hate? How can you not care, at all, after so much
time of me trying to give to you?
No, I wasn’t perfect.
Nobody ever is.
But surely, the something—the all of myself that I gave,
must have meant something? Surely it must have changed something, maybe just
one thing for you? Surely, you must be ever so slightly different, for having
known me for so many years?
But no, I was invisible. I didn’t exist. I guess that would mean, I didn’t influence you, at all.
Cause it was always just you. Only you.
