Meet Me In The Hallway

Titanic

"What Happened to us Melly?" Those had been Harry's last words while I shooed him away from my door with perhaps no satisfying response for either of us. His eyes had been pointed at the floor, thank god, because the forlorn glow of his green iris' over the course of our retroactive breakup would live inside me like a parasite picked up on a foreign holiday. Nesting down along with happy memories of gilded youth and glossy first love to color the memories with bile and sick.

I hadn't answered and I could tell, because I still knew him, that he ached to hug me. But I didn't open my tightly crossed arms to him. After the night, the conversation, my flinging myself upon him and the way we had just bashed ourselves on the shores of our memories these were the most painful moments since I ran in the first place.I just couldn't. The idea of his arms around me and his smell in my nose and his broad back under my hands would have undone me. His affection was always the key to the lock I kept upon the secret me.

She was a mess right now, I couldn't have her come out, even though I could hear her wailing to break free. I kept my arms wrapped tightly around me so I could keep her inside where she belonged and maybe to give the both of us a second best comfort.

I don't recommend having a breakup three years after the fact. Or breaking up at all when you still intensely love the person because you are afraid. This was not a case of better to have loved and lost. Nobody left my living room feeling like a winner. And I didn't even get to leave.

Why did I run? Move country on him and change my number?

I was scared. Because when we were good we were so good, but when we were bad, there was nothing left of me. I was empty swimming pool, a thing just waiting to be filled with purpose when he was away. He was away alot. The parts of us that fit together were like a my first puzzle, easy and obvious. The problem was we were missing pieces. Some of the missing links may have come with experience. Maybe had we loved later, when we weren't barely out of the womb and thrust into flashbulb lights, we may have survived.

His hand on mine had loosed feelings I thought long-flushed. I didn't talk for some time, and he even in that moment against all of his instincts, knew better than to touch me anymore or anywhere more intimate than my fingers. Even that touch was a trigger, not for my tongue, just for tears.

One night, after, when I was dissecting all the ways he was wrong so I could justify my decision, I realized a fundamental incompatibility of ours; our very own irreconcilable difference. Harry was a great talker, but didn't hear me as time went on. I was a great listener, but when he stopped talking I wasn't able to start.

I sucked up my breath and swiped my dress sleeve under my nose, since he had seen me in every state from ecstatic to enraged, there was no front to put up.

"I.." I gulped. "I don't know."

He gripped my hand and his jaw hardened.

"No, no," I quieted him. His grip remained just the right side of painful. "I mean, Harry." My voice cracked. "We were over, weren't we? Just neither of us wanted to acknowledge it."

He was shaking his head. "No, Melody. You may have been done, but I didn't think we were anywhere near done. You at least owed me the courtesy of a call if not a face to face conversation. Being abandoned--" He sniffed and looked away. "Like, I know things had been rough for a while—"

"Harry, we hadn't spoken, beyond a vague text or two, in over a month. The times we had spoken, we fought. I'm not even sure what we fought over. We may as well have been exploding over jam. We either had nothing to say to one another or we yelled. I understand why you didn't want to call. I wouldn't have wanted to listen to my whining either. And you had no convenient sickness to blame your silence on that time, and," I bit my lip. "And I saw the pictures."