Thorns

Where do you go?

Where do you go to get rid of the pain of a loss so profound it feels as if your very soul has been ripped from you? How do you empty a bottomless well of anger and rage and resentment so deep the oceans of the world would be but a drop in the vastness of its size? How do you let go of something you've spent the last 6 years nourishing, tending, growing when it rises up and says to you "I don't need you anymore?"

I thought I was through with this. I thought, "I'm over it, I've moved on".

Then I see him and it shatters all over again. I hear his voice on the phone and the stitches I've applied to my broken heart rend like gossamer in a spring zephyr. I am reduced to a quivering mass in a bed I am reluctant to change the sheets of because it means removing the last vestage of him; his scent.

I've loved and lost before. This is not new. This is a path well trod, rutted and landmarked.

Yet this, these feelings of abject terror, of age and loneliness and the absolute certainty that this was not supposed to end like this, this was supposed to be "forever", I promised, he promised, we promised, is.

I could have accepted it if he cheated. I would have been ok with an open relationship. But this? This is the bridge I cannot cross. This is the only place I cannot go.

For he, the man that I thought was the man I would grow old with, the man who I would raise a child with, the man I thought would be there till death do us part has decided.

He wants to be a woman.

I don't know where to go with this. I am not even numb. I am void. It's as if the place I once occupied in this space and time is now vacant. A blank empty space where I once was.

There are voids everywhere.

Hangars where his clothes once were. The medicine cabinet's gaping maw lacks the elixirs and vials that rendered his sickness "undetectable". The cold black hole in my bed that once held his warm, soft, sweet body.

I seem to have one too many things now. Two closets, two sinks, two nightstands where the solitary form of each suffices now. It is the singular nature of my condition that I must become used to now.

I don't know where I will end up on this new unplanned journey. I was settled into my comfortable little life. I was content. Now all of that has changed. I hope you will join me on this part of the journey. I don't know how long this will last, or how interesting it will be. I make no promises.

There is one thing that I do plan on doing first thing tomorrow.

I'm changing the sheets.