I wait too long to say what needs to be said once I know how difficult it will be to hear. It allows some degree of self-delusion — perhaps the difficulty is not due to the inherently disappointing nature of the message, but to my lack of confidence that it is true. Somehow, the fact that delaying the inevitable makes it that much worse doesn’t factor into it.
The horror builds like water pressure behind a dam. There will be no releasing it slowly; everything rushes out at once when the little Dutch boy finally plucks up his courage and pulls his finger out of the dike.
The calm before the storm gets all the press, but it’s the spooky stillness afterwards that’s more deserving. Everything to be said, said. All the wind blown, each drop of rain poured out, the thunder that must clap, has done so.
I had thought I’d have made some sense of things by now. The muddy bottom exposed, the garbage and corpses and other forgotten things lying there still and honest. But I understand neither the flood nor the steady gathering trickle leading up to it. Only that this is my doing — that I bear responsibility for the destruction in B__’s heart, and my justifications cannot repair it.
I gave myself a few weeks to collect my thoughts, and even still they are so very few.
Ninty-nine percent of the time, one’s reason for breaking up boils down to: I think I can do better. And any lack of certainty over the decision itself is really a lack of certainty over the initial assumption that lead to it.
“What did you do out there?
What did you decide?
You said you needed time,
and you had time.”
– Ani DiFranco
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