Fifty Percent

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I don't memorize anything but your smell so please excuse this piece of paper covering our entire relationship before me.

I stand here before you today taking 50% of the blame for us not working, for the failure of our bones rubbing into each other until they made dust, for the failure of our lips spewing more curse words than goodbye kisses, for the failure of having sperm and eggs and still unable to build a human better than ourselves.  I claim 50% of that, my love and I tax myself heavily for the charge of not loving you correctly.  Today, my hands are empty with the scent of you.  The lines across my palms are telephone wires that cannot bring us enough service to converse anymore. I stand before you with arthritis in my fingers from the cramps of writing you love letters every day.  I just wanted to make sure your baggage had reminders of good times in it. I mean, I always knew you would leave or I would leave or we'd leave each other in picture frames and text message conversations both of us would be too afraid to delete or remove.  I wanted to tell you that honestly, I wasn't that honest.  Your vagueness angered me because I knew far too well what was submerged behind smoke and mirrors.  I knew all too well what missing details meant and how we squeezed men and women into the crevices of what we called our busy lives.  I want to apologize for not apologizing enough.  

My perfume still lingers in your leather.  Strands of my hair are still tangled into the cotton thread of your pillows.  My dress lays in your closet right where you buried me and all that you felt for me.  I buried you too, into the corners of my mind where even God has learned not to disturb.  I can't even bring myself to mourn you aloud, can't bring myself to say that this kind of forever is permanent - the kind of forever that does not include you.  I look at all the energy channeled into something I could actually own, something I could look at and define as success.  I give you 50% of the profit called my womanhood.  I charge you 50% of the debt of wounds I've gathered loving, hating and missing you.  I won't bill you for the funeral I had for you, though it was condemning to rest my hopes and dreams six feet under the ground, it was freeing.  It was freeing to give you back to God.  I'm sure He needed an angel more than I needed a  marriage that would have ended in divorce anyway.  This is not to remind you that you are loved.  This is to acknowledge that you are unloved by me today, that my soul cannot wrinkle to your excuses or your memories.  My insides cannot churn into butter at the sight of skin.  My breath can no longer escape me when the sun hits your pupils like silver bullets into the flesh of men during World War II.  My steps cannot soften afraid to half step on your ego.  I cannot love you this way.  I cannot miss you tomorrow or the day after that.  I cannot love you.
I cannot.
And I wish for one thing - I wish for you to stop loving me enough that you visit me in my dreams.  You are not welcome here.  My heart is an international destination, its borders are closed off to the import of you.  This space is not US territory.  Please. Really leave me. Put on your shoes and run till your feet bleed and then keep running.  I will run the other way.  I will take 50% of the race in order for us to find separate finish lines.

Please.
Thank you.
Freed birds.
Shedding snakes.
Quiet snowfall.  
Erupting volcanoes.
Cracked sidewalks. 
Rough oceans.
Estranged lovers.
Don't worry about me calling you.  We can only call on the dead when we're ready to join them.
C'est la vie.