gravity

prologue

Oftentimes, I ask myself what I did to deserve this – if loving you was my mistake, and losing you was the punishment. I'm still trying to wrap my heart and mind around the empty space that's suddenly there, because no matter how hard I try my efforts slip past my fingers, right between the spaces where you once existed. And I can't quite understand how something can be there one moment and gone the next, because I always thought that while people's lives ended with a bullet, love was the smoking gun in the equation. But you twisted all that around, flipped the analogy over the way you'd flip your hair off your eyes: effortlessly callous, as if you had no remorse drawing shadows over my fears and lighting flames over my secrets. So now i'm left with gun in hand and bullet in heart, looking very much like a boy who's given up on the world, when in truth it's more likely that the world has given up on me.

I think the worst part is having your existence cease mine. When you're there, my whole system is attuned to you as if my frequencies are otherwise incomplete. And I hate that space you've taken up in my thoughts, hate how no matter how hard I try to keep you out you just walk right back in with my traitorous hands opening the door for you; because no matter how much I don't want you in my thoughts, you've made a home in them, and maybe that's why it's all you ever go back to.

To see you these days makes me hurt. To see you happy makes it worse. I'm not the kind of saint who'd be happy because you're happy; it would patch up some wounds, I think, to see you even the slightest bit miserable, because it must be making your day seeing me struggle for some sort of foothold in this mess that I call my life.

But I want you to know that i'm trying. It's been a few months, and i've been trying. They said writing it down would help. They didn't say how much it would hurt remembering all this, writing and explaining and making real what supposedly only lives in my mind. And people will never really understand, I know. At least, not in the way I want them to. They may understand that it hurts, but they will not understand why it hurts, because no one really knows you, Wendy. Even I don't.

Not anymore.

They may know all your whats and hows but they will never know your whys, and part of me wants to take the secrets to my grave because it's all I have left of not only was once upon a time, “Wendy,” but of “Max and Wendy,” too. But they said I had to tell our story, that's really more on your story, because ever since you barreled in my life all I've done is let my moon revolve your sun, basking in that joy and warmth and reflecting it back in waves. But in the process of loving and fixing you, I didn't realize that you didn't want to be fixed, and you didn't want to be loved – at least, not by me. And at the end of all things, of all these words that may either mean everything or nothing to you, I just want you to know one thing:

I'm sorry I was never enough.

And hopefully as I write all this down, I'll figure out why.