A Tightrope of Insanity

“People change.” But it’s always the best ones who shed their soft skin, hardening as candle wax does.

I was used to seeing the back of her, used to placing my shoes in her footprints as she went from one thing to the next like a bee and her flowers. Which is to say, I should have been prepared when I saw the last of her.

I was not.

I tracked her problems as if they were stars and I was an astronomer, marking out the constellations. It drove me to a tightrope titled ‘insanity’, and I knew I could simply step to the ground and its safety, but the fall was further for her and I couldn’t leave her walking that fine line alone.

There was a voice screaming in my head, you can’t survive this, but what choice did I have? I was chained down by the debt of a hospital bed. She’d healed me and healed me and healed me and how could I leave her when she should’ve been swallowing painkillers and instead she was injecting herself with denial?

When the tightrope became my noose, it seemed almost as if she was simply glad she was no longer stuck stumbling along it like a puppet. I was bidding goodbye to breath and hope but not her. Never her.

And then.

And then.

And then she disappeared.

But not before ripping out my stitches and washing her hands of my blood. I think her conscience might be as empty as my life without her.

All the words are worthless, washed away like chalk in rain, vanishing like she did. All the words are meaningless except one.

Why?

But she cares about that question as much as she cares about me, which is to say, not at all.

You scour the page for a happy ending and I search for closure. Neither finds what we’re looking for.