Imagine. My life without him.
When I was with him I couldn’t imagine my life without him. In the beginning, his love made me feel alive. My senses awoke and I became hypersensitive to the air, to sounds, to sights. I looked at the world with the eyes of a new born child. I fell in love, minute by minute, day by day, with me as he saw me, with the world as he saw it, with life as he painted it. He completed me. Coloured in the grays of my world with the multi-hued wonder of his painter’s palette filled with the sparkling colours of the rainbow. He became the dot above my ‘I�? the exclamation mark after each breath. His words soaked into my parched mind, filling the crevices of pain etched into the soil of my memory where I had become lost in my search for my one true love, fearful that I would never find him. And there he was. My soul mate. My Prince. The only one who saw me. Heard me. Knew me. Upon his first tender kiss my heart beat in time with his and nestled into the inviting warmth of finding its home within him. Without hesitation my heart burst open and he settled in to claim it as his own. I offered him all that I was and he kept taking me deeper and deeper. In those first heady days of our affair, I seeped my body in his touch, laid bare my heart, and peeled back my skin to reveal my bones stripped clean of all defences. He touched me. Inside and out. And I lay still beneath his hands in breathless wonder of finding myself where I belonged beneath his touch as he memorized my skin, my face, every curve and arc and angle of my body. I mapped his face upon my fingertips; the bone above his eyes, the furrow between his brows, the mole upon his cheek, the fleshy skin of his earlobes. I rubbed the scent of him, the touch, the textures into my flesh. I embedded the feel of him into my fingertips, the look of him into my mind. In those moments when he was gone, I would touch my fingertips to my lips and smell him, feel him, hear him murmuring his soft, gentle words of love that filled my heart with the song of our love everlasting. Without him, I ached. Without him, I yearned for his return to fill my empty arms. I waited in moist and tender expectation of his touch reverently moving over me, caressing my body, my soul, my heart. My lips would kiss his palm and I would feel him growing inside me, moving me closer to that place where the world grew eerily silent and I lost myself in the ecstasy of knowing I was nothing without his love guiding me back to life. I was love. In love. Completely loved. Immersed in his love I could not imagine my life without him. He promised me I would never have to know the emptiness of my life before him. I would never have to be without him, ever again. He told me he was mine and I was his forever and a day. Through time eternal, happily ever after. He told me everything I wanted to hear and drowned me in the ever lasting promise of his love. He would never let me go he whispered. I believed him. Besotted, immersed in the hypnotic waves of pleasure rippling through my body as he spun a magic thrall within my mind, I could not see the terror lurking behind the empty promises of his undying love. I could not see the fire burning. I could not feel the heat rising. I blinded myself to the truth and basked in the afterglow of love bursting upon my dream come true. My hungry heart feasted on his promises of endless sunrises and golden moments forever-after. I looked away from his anger. I looked away from his abuse and turned my back on the pain of loving him because I could not walk away from him. I could not see my life without him. In my refusal to see the truth, he continued to spin his lies and I became deaf and blind to the truth revealed in his rage simmering at the edges of my dream. He was lying with every word. Deceiving me with every action. He hit me with the truth as I lay exposed upon the soiled sheets of our promises to love one another in sickness and in health, until death do us part. He shred my love with his ice cold hands. He ripped away the gossamer curtain of my belief in happily ever after. With one deft thrust, he pierced my hopes with the knife-edge of his disdain and I fell apart beneath the ruthless blows of his anger pummeling me into submission. My heart was broken. Look at you, he screamed at my huddled body curled in upon itself, desperately trying to shelter my heart within the cavity of my chest from the truth of his scornful glare. You are not worthy of my love. I believed him. My skin stretched taut across my battered and bruised body. My mind freefalling through time pouring bitter tears through my veins in a futile attempt to fill the shattered vessel of my heart. I could not stop the bleeding. Frightened I would die, terrified he would leave me behind to drown in the brackish waters of my fears, I lay bare my pride and pleaded with him to take me back. One more time. To bring me home again to that place where I belonged within his heart. And he relented. Again and again and again. Relentlessly, he took me back. He brought me home to that place where I would sigh with relief to find my heartache stilled beneath the tenderness of his touch, for just one moment, again and again and again. Until the next time when he would rage and I would plead for him to take me back so that I could show him with my love that I would never leave him. How could I leave a love so true as the one that had blossomed within my mind when first he had planted the seed of his deceit in the springtime of our affair? It was the lie of that love I nurtured as he continued with each relentless thrust and parry of his uncompromising belief that I was his to have and to hold. My mind reeled back in horror at his words and clung in desperation to my hope that love would blossom again if only I could hold onto the promises I believed in. Holding on, losing ground, I became diminished in my capacity to hold out against the truth hardening my heart against his furious insistence, it was all my fault. In my shame and self-denigrating blame, I lost hold of who I was and held onto the nothing he told me I would be without him. In time, my voice grew fainter as I sank beneath the weight of my fear. Pinned by invisible bonds of terror, his words held me in silent captivity in the pain of loving him. While outside the narrow corridor of my life with him, a cacophony of angry voices demanded that I find my life without him. I couldn't find it. He was always there. Haunting me. Calling me. Coercing me to move deeper into his web. Eventually, even the voices grew silent. They couldn't understand why I wouldn’t leave. I couldn't tell them the truth. I knew they wouldn't believe me. I could not imagine my world without him. Couldn't they see? Leaving him would be the death of me. He held my heart in the vice grip of his lies and I had lost the key to set it free. I had lost my way in the darkness for I was his to have and to hold in the fear that I could not find my life without him. Why did I stay? He told me he would never let me go. He told me if I left, I would fall. He told me I was nothing without him. He told me leaving him would kill me. I believed him. Until I turned my back upon is lies and walked away from the lure of his untrue love reeling me into the despair of living in the depths of his darkness. Away from him, his lies were revealed in the light of each new day. Away from him, I no longer searched for my truth within him and found it rising with my spirit within me. Away from him, I found my belief in me. In my life without him. Without him, as the sun bursts across the horizon and I awaken to another day in freedom, I breathe a sigh of relief that I have come home to where I belong and am free to imagine the beauty of my life without him. October, 2005
Copyright MLG | 
