The best of our days consisted of me watching her take drugs and staring off like she was a wolf that heard a small creature off in the distance.  She waits to piece together it’s location for the hunt, but it never shows any promise. At times I feel like she could quit the chemicals if she wanted but it’s that promise of a good hunt she can’t seem to shake for the life of her. The problem here is that she will never realize that she is the one being hunted.
The sun pulls itself up over the horizon, back from the end of the world, and I hold onto her like a small child holds a red balloon. But the drugs were wild gusts of wind and on certain days, I felt as if I’d “accidentally” let go of her string. It grows tiresome and I am not such a small child anymore.  I guess you could say that was my addiction: my inner child had passed long ago and following on her little “hunts” made me feel as if I was visiting it’s grave site. Filling her needles for her was as if I was giving it flowers and holding her hand while she nods off was like a little prayer uttered.

It’s crazy how my body and mind simply refuse to work together. Sometimes she repulsed me and I only loved her with my mind. Like the way she took the breath right out of my chest the day I saw her standing so awkwardly in the bookstore seeking out a novel she had been talking about for weeks. It was the strangest thing and I couldn’t fathom how her body could even naturally assemble like that. Her legs were crossed and she stood on her toes with her back arched and twisted. Her arms were straight in front of her but clasped inside out and tangled. Like an ancient statue with a million small pieces knocked out, barely holding itself together. Like any day now she would crumble into dust and thousands of years of history would dissolve into a pile of dust. How funny the mind works that I could fall so hopelessly for a mere stance.

Other days, I loved her with only my body and I felt nothing more. It would remain that way for weeks until I caught another glimpse of something that made me come to my senses. She was a helpless old toy and the memories of my youth threw her around as if I had never grown. She couldn’t stray very far.

But I made up my mind one night while we headed back over the bridge towards her place. The passenger seat was pushed back and she was curled into a little ball. She was so small I could barely keep my eyes off the road. How does something so lovely wander so far off and land here with me? I wasn’t even sure if she was still breathing,  it had been a long night and she certainly pushed her limits. I couldn’t concentrate,  I would look away from the road and stare at her sleeping until I felt the tires meet the grass, then I would correct the vehicle and stare at her some more until it happened again and I did this almost the entire way home.  I wanted to keep her like that forever.  I decided I would leave that night and never come back. I couldn’t imagine things ever getting better than that exact moment and I wanted to make sure that no matter where I went from then on, no matter who I was with, I would always have her sleeping so beautiful in my head and I could find peace.
I carried her into her apartment and placed her on the sofa. She didn’t move a single muscle until I started to walk away and her little awkward fingers grabbed at my pant leg without even opening her eyes. She was so weak that her hand just fell right off as I walked away. She was a helpless little toy and I had grown old. I had realized tonight that the memories of things you once loved are much stronger than things you still have.  Love is like a loud roar and people grow so used to it over the years that it eventually blends into the background. The same way people that live near great waterfalls no longer hear it. I carefully created a situation and a woman that I could hear loudly and love forever. This was the only thing that made sense.

People these days naturally put up walls to protect themselves. You can’t blame them, the world is a cold place and “survival of the fittest” has never been so prominent. But sometimes,  its not the walls that you have to worry about. Sometimes they are placed there for your benefit. You could build a great mansion with all the walls me and her built from each other and the rest of the world. But all the items decaying in the crawlspaces behind her walls made this great palace uninhabitable. 

I locked the door behind me and tossed the key to that great home down a sewage drain.