INNITY
We finalised our break up over a candlelit dinner paired with some cocktails. We visited the restaurant we’ve been meaning to try and shared a gentle evening together. All night, we looked longingly into each other’s eyes, laughed, and cried. We admired and appreciated the beautiful lover we were lucky enough to have called ours.
The complicated solitude of hotel rooms late at night, spending time in a place that’s both yours and emphatically not yours, both soulless and homey, both timeless and temporary, suspended somewhere halfway between vacancy and no vacancy. – Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
Love has a funny way of coming and going.
When I first met him, it came in the form of an extended interview. Two hours of stolen time. Heart fluttering and eyes dancing at the most unexpected encounter. I didn’t think I would find love on the steps of the auditorium. It was a regular Wednesday, and he was just one of the many people I was obligated to talk to. I wasn’t even looking for a relationship having just turned down three dates in the last week but unknowingly, he found his way into my guarded heart. Without warning, twenty minutes turned into two hours and within two weeks I started calling him mine.
When love left, he ran to 10 Bond Street and picked out a suitcase. He efficiently emptied out his half of belongings from the suitcase we shared and headed home to LA without me. Every night I came home to an empty hotel room unsure if I should be happy about the extra space or find the silence eerie. A week later when I arrived home in LA, our houses were emptied. It was moving season. We packed each other into boxes, exchanged goodbyes, and he flew out to Hawaii with our friends – a trip we said we’d all go together. I slept alone in the dark since then.
Tonight, grieve gently woke me up at 4:45 in the morning and the silence of the night without the sound of his breathing was deafening. The bed felt cold without the heat of his body and the new apartment felt too big for just me. Heartache demanded my undivided attention, making it impossible to fall asleep and there was no point fighting. I stayed up watching the downtown skyline turn into sunrise, from soft twinkles to gentle rays of orange and pink – a view we used to admire together. Finally, I have it all to myself. I should be smiling, I thought so bitterly.
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