by Lily Seabrooke

Created on: June 09, 2010

I hope you can see me from here. I'm standing by the window looking out, yet you don't see me. I must be silhouetted in the light from the lamp beside my desk, a clear outline to the street sheathed in darkness. I want you to. I want you to look up and to see something on you face, anything but nothing. Anything is better than nothing. You know where I live and I'm tired of this emptiness.

You're sitting on the bench, absorbed in the nothingness that you have written in your face so frequently. I want to race down the stairs and out the door and hug you, and maybe we can fill the space we left in each other. I fail to understand why I still love you, even after everything. The problem, the problem that leaves me standing here by the window, is that I don't know whether you still love me. Whether you have forgiven me as I forgave you. And I'm too much of a coward to ask. Because I don't want to see nothingness on your face. Not again.

I'm safe and warm, away from the world, but bleeding is easy. I'm watching you stand up, roll your shoulders – some part of me wants to think deliberately ignore the lit window meters from your eyes – and set yourself for home. I know the feeling you'll get when you walk through that door. That you come and sit out here to be alone, to be away from it all, to be someone else other than who they expect you to be, who they want you to be. If only you would walk through the door to me. You are always free to be yourself with me. But you don't trust me anyway, so you put up that wall again, and my efforts feel pointless.

I can't watch anymore. I won't watch. Someone once told me that can't was a coward's words for won't. But I won't watch while you sit there alone and the rain falls and you get steadily, slowly drenched. It hurts to see you like that. I'll draw the curtains, turn around, and go to sleep, knowing that image is going to be burnt into my brain. I'll dream of you, again, because you occupy my mind. Let me pick up the pieces of your heart, let me inside, let me occupy your mind as you do mine.

Screw this. I've waited long enough. I've walked past you shopping, seen you on the elevators at work, down the street, all under the unwritten agreement that we don't exist to each other. Doesn't mean I'm not painfully aware of your steps, your direction, the set of your shoulders as you move. The expression on your face. I'm not sure you see me, but I don't care anymore. I don't care for old arguments, for weeks of waiting, for nights sitting by the phone waiting for you to call, answering and getting disappointed. Here goes nothing.

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