breathe | r lewandowski

21

I didn't understand. Not one part of me understood.

I was alone again. Well, I wasn't technically alone, since I had my kitten Zeus living with me, but other than him, I was by myself yet again.

Three months had passed, Jagger had moved out of my house two months earlier, cutting off contact with me. I tried calling her cell, her house phone, I even wrote letters. But still, I got nothing.

She'd handed in her resignation at work before she moved out, meaning that the day she left my house was the last time I had seen her. And that, was heartbreaking.

I couldn't reach her, I couldn't talk to her or take care of her. I didn't even know how she was, or the twins. She was around six months pregnant and it scared me. I was missing out and the empty shell of a nursery that stood cold and bare on the second floor of my house caused a surge of pain to pass through me every time I walked by the door.

She was gone, and it looked like I was slowly disappearing along with her.

Time passed as time does, and I had found myself retreating further and further into my shell of a human being that I was long before I had even met Jagger. I had changed for a while, a short while at that, but I had changed.

I was bad before, sick in the head, but she had fixed me. All be it, temporarily. And now she had left, the light at the end of the tunnel had faded into nothing and every single day that I awoke to made me feel like I was no longer running towards that light, only straight into a brick wall.

I trained, I played my matches, I scored goals, and I won games, but I still felt less than content with myself. I was slipping back into my old ways, hating myself for reasons I didn't quite understand, which only made me resent myself and my mine even more.

Nobody seemed to know about Jagger and I. Nobody at the club had asked. The only people that knew were Mario and Thomas. How Thomas knew, I didn't know. He was the first person to approach me one morning at raining and send his regrets to me about Jagger and I's "break", as he'd titled it.

I didn't question him, because quite frankly the topic was not high up on things I wanted to talk about. In fact, I didn't want to talk at all.

Of course, Mario talked my ear off the whole day and he'd continued to do so for the months that followed. Only I had become less responsive. I had become tired, lethargic and un-motivated. I had nothing, nobody left and that to me meant that I had nothing to work for. My team disliked me, and personal gain was bottom of the list. I didn't want to reward myself, give myself pride and glory. No, all I wanted was to be happy.

And I was, but everything changed, leaving me to bring back the thoughts I had all those months ago about me not being able to be happy, about me being stone cold, dead inside.

I had stopped taking my pills months ago, my head felt heavy and it hurt all the time. I wasn't sure if the pain was real, or if I was just telling myself that everything in my body hurt.

I didn't want to admit it to myself, I didn't want her to be the one that saved me, the one that picks me up and drags me out of this deep dark hole that I dug myself and jumped straight into, but she was. Jagger was the one who had saved me. She had cared for me and nursed me even when I pushed her away. And through all of the dark times, she stuck by me, but when the light came, she was gone.

I changed, I became happier and more lively and that only seemed to discomfort her more than when I had been miserable. I had still managed to push her away, in both my dark self and the rare light that I possessed in those few months, it proved to me that I still, and always would, carry a cold, dead heart.

And so I sat and waited. I sat on my sofa, staring out of the window and watched the thick white clouds roll over the hills as the golden sun faded into nothingness behind them, watching winter dispense itself across the land, covering the tips of the grass with frost.

I sat and I waited, I waited days, weeks and months for the silence of an empty home to kick in and for me to finally realise that I was being ridiculous and I needed to pick myself up and start again. But the realisation never came.

Time passed and the more I waited, the more I became drained. The more I waited, the less I wanted the realisation and the more I waited, the less I remembered what I was actually waiting for.

Slowly, I gave up.

My mind had ceased me again, flooding my body with black fog that coated my muscles and my bones and changing me, turning me into the same monster of a person that I was before all this, before Jagger.

I showered, dressed and sprayed myself with a deep, musky cologne and headed out into the town. I brought back girl after girl and yet not one of them gave me any feeling. None of them changed me in the way that one night with a girl used to. Not even when I bumped into Dylan one night and we slept together, not even her.

Nothing gave me what I needed, not girls, not alcohol, not even drugs. I had given up with my football, the club doctor signing me off as mentally un fit, to which I didn't object.

And so I continued to sit there by my window, and I continued to wait for something that I knew would never come because whatever I was looking for can't hit someone who is so dead inside.

But eventually, something came. All the time in the world passed by my eyes, my mind, my bones, and I eventually awoke from a living nightmare.

However I didn't know that my real nightmare was only just beginning.