Disappointed by love from a stop sign and a red Volvo

I keep reaching out to my ex.  Knowing full well that she'd implode if she had to acknowledge or accept a single iota of the pain and abuse she's heaped on her closest friends and family.

It would be a lot, I imagine.  To go from sainthood to culpability, and then to confront the fact that everyone else had behaved amazingly well considering the panicked hatred you generate.

I couldn't completely justify a life of goodbyes like that.  But then I don't have to.  I did not hate my parents.  I did not mistreat them.  I valued and enjoyed my friends, My mistake was that I enjoyed being your partner more.  And, thereby, I destroyed myself.  I fell into the deep morass of true depression.  Of explosive PTSD.  Of mental health and behaviorial disorders that don't just go away with a jaunty jog up Castle Peak to take some selfies.  Wow, fourth gear!  I'm precious! 

I have lived with depression.  The real deal.  I know it like the lines under my eyes.  It is an ally and an adversary that cannot be bribed. 

You know nothing of deep trauma, just as you know nothing of the kind of love that allows me to keep thinking of you. Perhaps your brain conjures a presence that is never wrong. You live inside that tiny box somewhere?

I thought I could protect you from pain but that was not of value to you so you left over and over again. Maybe you experienced something like my life since 2012 when our two kidnapped cats died?  I won’t know that truth either—you will never share and I doubt you have much self knowledge, from what I witnessed  I know you were never in my field of vision when I craved and needed solace or to be held by you  Probably out for a run, or performing somewhere. 

Who on earth were you?  I couldn’t see you then, and I sure as hell can’t see you now that I fight for my own survival every moment.  I am blind looking for an absent ghost. Alone at my own seance. I hear my cat’s light paw placements walking to her water dish. But there’s no breathing here, other than my own slow tempo. No skin on flannel sheets. No curly hair. No you. It’s impossible to me that you ever existed.