Welcome to Febuary: The Month of Love.
“I love you,” she texted, her words glaring at me on the lighted screen.
She is nowhere near, yet somehow she is never far away. I have heard you. I feel you. I know you are telling me the truth.
It just isn’t enough.
Sometimes being loved through technology can be as painful as breaking up there. Sometimes her presence, seen only in the electrons of our cyber selves, feels hollow and empty. Sometimes, you have to pony up or let go. Sometimes the greatest challenge for a lover is walking away from a love.
Distance sucks. In the vastness of our divide, we live our lives through the ether, and we die a little bit in every moment split apart. Loving from the horizon is hard, but it is also easy. Too easy. When emotions become just words on a screen, we lose contact with each other. When prayers for the afflicted are typed on a keyboard, they become billboards for apathy. When love is shown in words, and not a kiss or a tight embrace, we lose a bit of who we are.
Soon, the void becomes the norm, and shelving the emptiness becomes just another ritual of our day. I’ve lost your voice somewhere along the line. I’ve lost your touch, your smile, and the way your hair feels on my chest. I’ve forgotten how your sweat tastes, and how your pleasure sounds. While your keyboard has gained your fingertips, I have lost the bumps they used to create on my skin.
You’ve become a phone screen, a picture on a computer monitor. You dangle on the arch, while forgetting the doorway it is supposed to be. One moment you are there, and the next you fade to black, disappearing right before my eyes.
I love you.
It’s daunting on my screen, nearly blinding me well into the night. I can close my eyes and it remains, and when I sleep it is all that I see.
But I can’t hear it. It remains somewhere else, it’s cup within me absence its nectar, its space within me darkened without the sun.
I’ll awake to nothing. No sounds of your breath, no warmth of your skin. There will be no passionate memories of the night before to arouse me, no flesh to fill with my heart’s desire. There will be no emotion as I go about the motions of the morning, minus the very pleasure that once ignited me to flame.
It’s just not enough anymore. I never made the choice to love you. I must, however, make the choice to let you go before all I feel of you is nothing more than my imagination. I can fly, for sure, but not with one wing shackled and my eyes searching for something that is just not there. I need the wind, and the wind needs me. I must, at last, soar.
And Yes!!! I love you!!! But I am not just feeling the relationship.