I spoke of you today. Did your ears burn? Does that work when you’re half the world away? Oh wait, you may be stateside again. I had not considered that until just now. I prefer you far, far away in a foreign and magical land. Or was the magic something inside me? No, I think it was partially the magic of the Italian countryside. After I know you have vacated the beautiful foreign land, I want to go back. I want to go the house I took pictures of and write about the scars inside me. And how I managed to gather a few on the outside in trying to heal those within. 

I said the words today to someone.  I told him how you managed to break my heart not once but twice in a single lifetime. My throat closed up. The words were hard to form and even harder to get out of my mouth. But you see, this man said he deals strictly in truths. And you are the beginning and the end of my truth. No one can know me without knowing that part of the story. And he listened to the few sentences I could form about you. He listened with kind, knowing eyes. Had we not been in public I may have used his sweater to wipe the tears away, but that’s not much like me. 

It felt good to be honest and perhaps in a small way, just maybe, possibly by looking into his kind, knowing eyes and releasing the truth to him, it freed me from you just a bit. I wanted to run, but I didn’t. I stayed and I finally said –in a vague way though–how it killed a part of me. It isn’t that I don’t believe in love. Oh quite the contrary. I know it’s real. I have the scars to prove it, inside and out. I told this man about the scars on my hands. He shares a love of Bukowski. You wouldn’t like Bukowski. 

Or would you? That’s the problem with the truth, I fell for your lies and so it troubles me not knowing what was real and what exactly was false. What’s truth? How much was honest and how much was just a game?  

It’s all grey matter now. Whatever I thought was black and white got all mixed up. A giant, dusty pile of greyness. When everything collapsed, a cloud of dust filled parts of my soul and, as the man with kind eyes and sexy shoes noted, women are notorious for being messy. I just keep it in the corner of my soul and don’t look there anymore. I haven’t looked in a couple of years now. It’s not safe over there. It hurts to get near it.

And now I wonder, does pain beget pain? It’s quite impressive how I have subsequently managed to pick out a couple of the absolute worst people on the planet to trust. Miserable failures. It’s like your ghost is here helping me create more pain. Maybe it’s the dusty, grey debris field clouding everything. I tiptoe around it, trying not to stir anything, afraid what might happen if I look at it. 

The attractive man with those kind eyes that pulled me in like magnets said he believes it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. 

Maybe one day I will go to the house in Italy and write. Maybe there I can pick through the collapsed parts and see if anything is salvageable. 

  
 Walking down an Italian road, we came across this vacant property and I dreamt of renting it and writing a novel there.