I wanted to thank you for dumping me. Of course, the wound is still fresh, the blood trickles every now and again, and it takes little for the tears to flow. I was blind-sided when we sat in that garden and the silence settled in, and when I cleaved the glass wall that had solidified between us with the question:
“Are we okay?” and, as if I hit you, you inhaled the atmosphere, leaving me with nothing to breathe, and you just stared at me with those boutonniere blue eyes. They said the answer I’d never anticipated would creep into the world tonight. Of course, when you dropped my hand, I wanted to take off, to leave you sitting amongst those pretty little trees by yourself, to suck on the bitter words that, somewhere in my mind, I knew had been brimming on your tongue for a long while. But after you walked me home, the damn perfect gentleman you are, I slumped against my bedroom door and searched for air. I couldn’t breath; I wanted to throw up, to purge you all away. I wanted my skin to slough off; I wanted every ounce of the carbon in my flesh to be overhauled-yanked out, destroyed, replaced- because it reminded me when we were new, and your fingers mapped my contours and your eyes drank me. But my skin stayed and I quelled my churning guts, and a harsh epiphany settled in my mind. I thought I was working on falling in love with you up until that point, but all was not lost, I’d succeeded. No, it hadn’t culminated in the suffocatingly exquisite romantic love I’d hoped for, but i loved you for being my guide, for showing me a mode of life and thought, a set of values and a direction of existence I didn’t know. I loved you for making me realize that I am worth something. I loved you for sharing yourself with me. And I still love you, not in the romantic sense- that i was working on but never achieved- in an admiring, grateful, in-debt sense. I love you for holding my heart in your hands and squeezing till you broke me open, because now as the tears dry and I stitch up that wound, you’re the springboard that has lifted me on to the next plateau on the mountain of adulthood. And I will love you ten years from now, because you were the spark that generated my new self worth, that splintered my skewed values, that crafted the bare bones of the mold for who the new you will be-you elevated that standard, and I will not settle now. Romantically? I never loved you, probably never will. Like I said, I was working on that, but you squeezed instead of caressed. But really, don’t get the wrong idea. The best feeling of the world was when we were new-but a close second is when I tottered off of cloud nine back into my center, but with your words and lessons tucked in my breast pocket, close to my heart and joining me at the helm. Thank you for dumping me, because the lessons were hard learned, but immeasurably valuable. Thank you for doing it quickly because the time between, when I was unconsciously falling, drowning in confused darkness when you stopped looking at me, and when your fingers were limp in mine, was a slow and painful disease that, had we tried to heal it, would have blackened those lessons I carry on my bosom today. So thank you. I’ll always love you for holding me close when you had eyes for me, and for being honest and severing the vein that connected us when you went blind.