Her Love Never Was

The Ancient of Days (Fitzwilliam) by William Blake

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I heard today it didn’t happen. I heard it was only a rumor. My beginning, my end, my in between were nothing more than a trickle of fiction falling into an abyss of jagged rocks and smooth stones of black and gray and blue and bronze there beneath a pool, a pond, a puddle alongside broken pavement. It couldn’t be more ordinary than if it were on a mission to be mild. What I thought were hues bordering on brilliance were dull and easily forgotten the way quartz or halite or calcite are forgotten after they fall through outstretched hands and opened fingers. She, the game changer, changed my game with no more than fine and few words. Burst was my balloon and tossed over the angry neighbor’s wall went my ball.

I was told my lifetime was lifeless, that it was empty and obsolete. Whatever she says I am I will be and she said I will be nothing to her and no more. She said she didn’t want me around and I believed her. I believed in my love betrayed and heart decayed. I believed I was slain and left to limp away in loneliness. I was left to hold and hug a sunken heart the way it sinks when it learns there is no Santa.

Peaks I had reached had become plateaus. I could see what took years to nurture and reluctantly acknowledge were washed away in seconds between one text and the next. I hung on each unfinished message waiting while she worked on it until she stopped working on it and had nothing more to say. She stopped short, but she said it anyway. She said it in a language I understood, in a pause, in one I was hoping was pregnant about to be birthed and then it was gone, edited, trimmed, redacted and aborted and that dead baby died the way I did, silently, quietly on common rocks under what was once a river. And that river and me and us and we were nothing any longer. I was over before it ever began because she said so and she said it with finality and forever. So me, my plans, my ideas and designs, my achievements which were hopeless to hold a candle to simply being near or around her on an orchard of olive trees were wrecked on stone without even a splash, because a rumor is what she called it and a rumor it was. While my love is and will be, her love never was.