k.e.a.

The parking lot was cold and wet, and I was shivering. You looked at me with a smile in your eyes and a grin on your face-- two distinctly different facial expressions where you’re concerned-- and you told me, “It gets better, I promise. Just wait for it.” But you failed to remember that I’d already been waiting for more than seventeen years, and I was seriously fucking sick of sitting around with my thumb up my ass-- hoping for a change, praying for a miracle.

Under flickering neon lights and between yellow-painted boxes on the ground, I hated you almost as much as I loved you, yet I still knew you were right.

“When?” I asked, but you didn’t understand me. “When exactly does it get better? How do I fix this?”

I was nearly screaming by then-- frustration was clawing its way from the emptiness in my gut, up through my esophagus and into my voice box. Exasperation was a harsh, sour bile, but I swallowed it hard and refused to break as long as you were still standing there. The vomit could wait, I told myself, even as it rose again and again in the back of my throat.

There was a weighty pause, stretching on until the silence nearly suffocated us both. And then you spoke, “It’s simple, really.” You paused to light a cigarette and another wave of nausea rolled through my body. “It’s like this… how do you eat an elephant?”

I stared wordlessly into your polar-icecap eyes, for once filled with the warmth of clear-blue ocean waters. Your lips had moved, I was sure of it. But heartache makes it hard to hear sometimes, and I was certain I’d misunderstood. I didn’t say a word, and you sighed without shifting or blinking.

I had no answer to give you and nothing at all to give myself.

“Take a bite and start chewing,” you finally mumbled through a clenched jaw.

One look at you, and I knew this was no bad joke, it was just a bad truth. The floodgates opened as you gave me that last, most important gift of our relationship. I finally let go and offered up the contents of my stomach-- surrendered the lack of food in my belly to the god of my misunderstanding, wherever she happened to be hiding in that parking lot.

And still, I can’t forget the way your fingers felt as you held back my hair and watched me fall apart. I can’t block out the memory of your other hand on my back, gently rubbing my shoulder blades as my body tried desperately to understand the true meaning of emptiness. I can’t let go of that feeling-- pasty-white, frail, hunched over a drainpipe, and dry-heaving through tears-- I was loved, even as my insides splashed onto your shoes.

I won’t give up that image of you, watching me drive away for what we both knew would have to be the last time. The realization that I could never come crawling back again was all over your face, and I almost felt guilty for letting you hurt me the way you did. But ‘almost’ is a tricky word, I’ve found.

I knew all of this would never make sense to anyone but us, and that I’d never get the chance to explain why elephants must be eaten one bite at a time, or what the hell that has to do with the end of you and me. But it didn’t matter. When the questions would start-- the ‘but you two were so happy…’s and the other benevolent bullshit,

I’d tell them the truth: You were my Yoda, but unfortunately, that was all.