I am the Leftover

It’s like: how when glass breaks and you clean up the shards, sometimes only when you walk barefoot on what you think is clean floor do you notice—because you cut yourself—that there is more. There on the seemingly clean floor of this or that day, where I dare walk airily and barefoot (I even felt free!), there they appear, and they cut. They are smaller than I thought they could be. Answers to my questions about when will this brokenheartedness end limp out of me, unconvinced.

I’m the leftover, I’m the left. I am no longer someone that is loved and I am not held and I am not wanted and I am not needed. And when I need I am not met. All the while I have to sit and watch it happen to them, barely one giddy eight-year old’s account removed. My son barely has a memory of a family with me and his father in it while, before my eyes, he falls in love with the idea of a new family that definitely does not include me. The details, the concrete logic and inevitability of it—hell, even the fundamental reality that all involved are better off this way—that’s a universe entirely distinct from days like this. Days where the world is one 360 degree mirror on the worse fears, most lonesome darkly held fears I ever had. And days like this I have had too many--they are like dogs that roam the streets for endless hours but no matter how far they get, they find their way home, only dirtier and hungrier. All my dances end at hasty midnight and my stardust-happiness, shortlived and aprehensive all along, is blown away. My carriage a pumpkin again.