To the love of my life

Robin Egg Blue

Walking into work I see a robin's egg. Just sitting in the middle of the sidewalk.

She painted her nails that color when we dated more often than not. Pale eggshell blue. Her bedroom was the same color. That color was all around her in my memories. I never liked it much before her but I grew to love it because I loved her so wholly, and after she left that color would trigger memories of us. The little details within those moments come rushing back so vividly it's like I'm reliving them. Even a decade later, if I see a flash of that color I can just enter a dream of my past that feels almost real.

And it's a preferable reality to the current one because she's still there. Her hands and they way they felt intertwined with mine, her fingers tracing lines into my back as I lay on the carpet in her parents' basement, the way her hair felt when it brushed my skin, and her perfume would linger even when she'd left. Every moment together was unique to me.

We were high school sweethearts and I never stopped loving her. Over a decade has passed and she's been the only person I've loved with every ounce of my being. She's perfect for me in every way except the only way that matters: she stopped loving me a long time ago. But she still comes around every few years but never for long. Just long enough to remind me that I never really moved on.

The booze seem sweeter when things are crumbling around you. So I start drinking again. At first I'm hoping it'll drown out the past but really all it does is drudge it up. And I'm so sick I start to prefer the drunken stupors because they blur my reality just enough that I might be able to convince myself she's lying next to me just before passing out.

When people ask why I don't date I lie and say I'm a widow sometimes. It's fucked up but it's easier than the truth. The person I love the most isn't dead, but she's no longer reachable by me. I dated others after her. Sometimes for months. They just weren't her. I can't force someone to love me but I can't help but be angry sometimes. I deserve to be loved too, I think. But it's not fair to try and fall in love with someone else when my heart belongs to a living ghost who still looms over my past.

I think about her daily. She disappears for a year or two and I get no communication from her. I start to be able to live again, to gain some semblance of happiness and I resign to myself that I had my one beautiful relationship and count myself thankful. Then she pops back into my life and everything is disrupted. All those feelings that dulled with time come back to the surface like they never left. I forget just how much influence they have over me and I hate myself for being at their whim even after 10 years. Then she fades away again out of my life and back into her own with someone new. And the cycle repeats.

So this time I wrote a letter asking her to stay gone this time. I asked her to call someone else on a summer night when you're feeling lonely and unloved. For my sake, leave me be so I can finally let her go. But I'm so afraid of a future without even the possibility of her in it that I can't bring myself to send it. So I didn't. I'm not sure where to go from here and I've been here so many times before. I had real love once though. It was the greatest thing I've ever experienced. I couldn't close the door on the person who gifted me that privilege. I guess I'll wait a little longer despite the pain.

While leaving work I found the remains of the egg I had seen earlier smashed and dried upon the sidewalk. Someone stepped on it. They were bright against the cold of the pavement. Little shards of robin egg blue.