You remember.

Thirteen September, middle of a blurry, balmy Jersey night. Soaking, you and me, half-in-half-out of jeans and t-shirts and bedsheets, in those rather lethargic late-afterglow moments. You didn't let on that they'd be our very last. Josh, lover mine, you didn't do a damn thing but zip up, stand up, fashion a light kiss on my spit-sticky mouth, grin wearily, climb out my bedroom window, never see me, never speak me another word, never, ever again. You took your leave. You exited stage left. You vanished into the both literal and proverbial night. You damaged me. Pain is ephemeral; this raw, numb, shaky sensation has already begun fading. But the damage will never be undone.

Under the hurt but over the damage, nestled in my chest, squirming, malignant, lies love. Stupidly, irrationally, sickeningly? I still love you. I have fought so fiercely to crush it, break it, annihilate it, and nothing has worked. No measure of philosophizing, discussion, pathetic weeping or strong liquor has been able to flush you from my consciousness. Were you to stumble back into my life as of now, I'd plaster you with kisses, weep gratefully into your button-down, cling to you like a particularly tenacious barnacle. All those wounded, aching diatribes I'd planned to spew would melt from memory. It wouldn't be 'til the last traces of your spit and sweat had dried to a musky film on my bare skin; 'til you'd sighed contentedly and rolled over like a beached jellyfish; 'til you'd pulled on your clothes, kissed me goodbye and driven home? only then would I remember what you're made of.

You are gorgeous, brilliant, charming, funny as hell, and a xxxxing monster. I can't fathom how you could have brought yourself to abandon me. You knew, you KNEW how intensely I loved you. Even had I not adored the sound of the words tumbling from my mouth and made them a million times over, you would've known. It radiated from my body in huge, sticky, bittersweet waves. Each time you entered my line of sight in form or my mind in spirit, it absolutely gushed. You knew, Josh darling. That knowledge, had you any remnants of caring or vestiges of compassion, should have kept you from shredding my life apart. Should have. I should have restrained the spurting sickly-sweet altruism. But I couldn't hold back. And you just? couldn't.

I'd bang out a list a thousand xxxxing printer pages long if I wanted to.

THINGS JULIA GAVE YOU:

the icing off my carrot cake
my body
anything particularly pretty or interesting my mind happened to spit out
love, unfathomably deep
the planet Jupiter

"Look," I said, "Check out that thing up in the sky. Bright thing. Spangly. It's Jupiter." For you, just for you, a planet? for you, everything I can, I wanted desperately to add. Then, half-stoned, meandering towards me across a night-blackened lawn, you laughed "Nah, it's not, it's the xxxxin' North Star." Wrong, beloved. It was Jupiter. I gave you the Red Planet. And just as with everything else, whether innocently or maliciously, you simply didn't care. No point then, to the exquisite pain I've endured; no logic or rhyme-scheme to all these mornings, evenings, late nights spent going through the motions with my head in a jar of cloying formaldehyde confusion and my heart carved up in the dissection pan. I never purported, Josh, to think there existed a point in this life. Not my style. But this is just too xxxxing absurd. It is a purposefully obscure French art film, it is purple grass, touchable music and salty lemonade. It is an excellent reminder why I don't go out anymore.

I xxxxed up. I trusted card-carrying member of the human race. You're not bad or evil or wrong, love. But, like nearly six billion others, you're an opportunistic vulture. I can't summon much anger when wrecking others' lives is as natural to you and they as breathing, sleeping, making babies, dying. You are an eminently natural entity. Yet you're also, outside the biology, a thinking man. And sleeping inside that bittersweet fact, my eventual recompense. You know what you did. Someone loved you, you in turn destroyed her. You will not forget. I will, one day, wear my scars well; like charcoal eyeliner and tigerlilies in my hair. Your remembrance of things past will always be sticky, caustic and terribly, vaguely shameful. Such actions are not as easily shaken from consciousness as old girlfriends. I'll have your face in my mind 'til I die, Josh. And for once, one grateful time, I think you'll reciprocate the favor.

Julia