Short Stop: Waiting

L.C. Hill

I’m waiting. Still after all this time.

Someone said, “He’ll just show up and knock on your door one day. That’s something he’d do.”

I wish they had never said that.

Even before you left, I knew you would go. I’m an expert at being left. I know when it’s coming long before the person leaving knows. People are all the same: their eyes are out the door before their feet make it there. It’s in the blank stare over my shoulder that I see their exit.

Hope springs eternal in a world made for temporary love, and that’s a dangerous dichotomy. No one stays. No one comes back. Those things are for movies, and books with happily ever afters, and pretty girls in hoop skirts and glass slippers. Those things are not for days that require waking up, and getting out of bed, and going to work. That’s the real stuff.

Yet, still, I wait for you to return. Heartbreak is funny like that. It doesn’t care that I’m irreparably independent, or that I’m terrible at love. It only cares that I once wasn’t for a little while. It seems, also, to revel in this secret I keep from everyone. Neither the heartache nor I want to hear the inevitable opinions about how stupid and pathetic I’m being. The heartache appreciates my silence.

But it forgets that I write those things I won’t say aloud. Much like, I imagine, you would like to forget.

Photo by Filip Kominik on Unsplash