Work Text:
Turns out love can’t fill the distance. It can’t build the never-ending connection across lands and oceans. It’s not the remedy for all the problems.
It’s merely an excuse.
You’re filled with the constant need to touch him. To feel him. The phone calls, texts or facetime never enough. But then even when you are with him there’s this ever-present, always-growing distance. The distance that you won’t measure in miles or kilometres. The distance you won’t be able to overcome with a simple flight. Even ‘I love you’ won’t be enough to avoid all the silence creeping upon you two. And even if you will lay against his back, clutching him tightly to your own body, holding him closely, puffing hot breaths against the nape of his neck, the distance will still be there. Expanding. And you don’t even realize when it just grows inside you until you feel the cracks breaking you in two. Until it aches. But it aches more when you are with him. Until everything you believed was true collapses like a house of cards. And you face the cruel truth. That loving him wasn’t enough. That being with him wasn’t enough.
Your voice cracks when you tell him — through a phone call that breaks you even more — that you need to talk. A blank expression on his face when you tell him that it isn’t working. Not anymore. The numb feeling overwhelming all your senses when he just shrugs, his brown curls tipping just so. When something hot and fierce inside you wants to scream, repressed by indifference embracing you, meeting his distant gaze. As if saying ‘ I knew ’. Saying ‘ we were heading this way ’. Hating him for it.
The sound of his footsteps echoing in the room, coming closer to you and giving the last hug.
A goodbye.
No tears. No screaming. No regretful words.
Just a silent I’m sorry .
Just an unspoken ‘ it wasn’t enough, loving you ’.
Just a quiet ‘it was not meant to be ’
And the sickening, awfully loud sound of your insides breaking, shattering.
The cracks finally deep enough to snap you in two. Because you were unable to fill them with love. Or maybe love wasn’t able to fill them.
And that gut-wrenching noise of doors clicking close.
~*~
You remember that painful knot inside you, the way your tears clogged your throat, burning your eyelids, but not spilling on your cheeks. And the only thing you could do was to hug your knees closely and wait for the pain to become bearable.
Every time it hurt a little less. Every time it lasted a little shorter.
Yet, it never went away.
And you will always remember how you couldn’t breathe, lungs trapped in your own body, suffocating you with grief.
Those first few weeks you barely remember them. You were getting up every day, doing god knows what things you planned, eating, drinking, working out as if nothing happened. As if nothing changed. But with ‘ It’s over. It’s done ’ a constant thought in the back of your mind. You were just existing.
You hadn’t even told your friends. Afraid of something perhaps. A disappointed. A pity. A fake comforting. You were just functioning, as normally as you could, until it all crumbled down
But you’ve learnt there will always be this hollowness inside you. This deep sort of longing towards something you once had. You will even remember the taste of it, the citrusy mix heavily settled on your tongue, and you will be ready to chase it. You will find other people. Maybe you will even fall in love with them. But even then you will not feel whole. You will not feel complete.
You will smile and you will laugh, and you will dance, and smoke, and drink, use life left and right, and up and down. And yet … there will always be something missing. Something you won’t find again.
You will stick the broken pieces together, moving forward, repeating, again and again, that time will heal you. But some things can’t be healed. Some wounds can’t be cured. It will die inside you, slowly. Little by little. And even then it won’t ever go away.
When you will breathe your last puff of air in this world, you will remember that. You will remember. And you will know it was precious as long as it lasted. Even though it left you broken for the rest of your existence.
Because that’s what it was.
You barely existed
And you will close your eyes for the last time, thinking ‘ it was enough ’.