KAILI: GKNEW-GKNEW GKNEW-GKNEW-GKNEW

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Like a ton of bricks.

I don’t think anything has ever hit me like a ton of bricks. Not love, not loss, not happiness: Those have always been slow burners. Perhaps I’m not soap opera enough.

There’s a moment when your brain suddenly kicks in, sure. It’s a casual conversation, a text, a flashback, which leads to a realisation. That was mine. I suddenly remembered what I was doing, that time that year, when we were “happy”.

And then, then it reels in. It recoils back—not like gravity flattening you, but a slow motion, gut burning, twist of the knife. Fuck it, not even a knife. Something more griping: a hand like a saxophone, curling notes all up inside you, but the sounds are dull and pull and muddle you up from gut to gut to get back out.

Tear after tear after tear. (Like, streaming down your face.)

I told you before, “it’s the little things that ruin me.”

My god we wasted so much time, didn’t we? Why the fuck didn’t we just talk? I held on to that slow death like any dying animal would, and death is not a noble, proud thing. It makes all of us beggars, clutching desperately to the closest thing we have, crying for just a little bit more. Just a little bit longer. Because it all came too quick.

I did not behave as I might have; I wish I had been strong, righteous, and served myself well. But that’s the sort of thing magazines and best friends tell you, because you should put yourself first. You’re better than that, gf.

I actually only have time to give. You wasted that thing. You can’t ever give that back, and now. Definitely, I am changed.

You started heading lightwards way ahead of me. And I clung to your leg, like a pathetic, frightened thing, getting dragged right through it. We knew it had come. Oh, months and months ago, we fucking knew it. You loosened your grip, your hand recoiling at any sniff of skin—like a slug in salt—and you let go of mine.

I wish you’d put me out of my misery sooner. I had begged you.

***

But it’s okay it’s okay it’s okay.

We shed one skin and grow another. It’s just there’s that distance, cold and cruel, and that power to slice me in half from all the way over there.

You don’t even have to do anything. You’re basically existing and it comes back. The polite thing to do would be to remove yourself from my brain, like untagging a picture. Wouldn’t that be a thing.

But it’s okay it’s okay it’s okay.

I’m all moved on, I am reincarnate, I am born again. (To continue the metaphor.) I’ve got stuff going on. Time is no healer: the next one is.

You need even just a brief someone else to remind you that the future exists; you were not the best I could have hoped for, and although I knew that, I just needed an adventure to prove it.

*** ***

Yeah, actually, time is a healer.