I Want You Back

"I want you back!"

I cried on the phone, uttering the well-rehearsed line that had been spinning around and around in my head like a broken record since she'd left.

She sighed a really long and exhausted sigh.

I sat there on the stairs with my eyes closed almost shaking as if an addict badly in need of a fix.

"I really don't know what to say Sam. We've been over this."

She's right, we had.

Many, many times.

The last one was in this very room like a war zone strewn with suitcases and boxes full of old CDs and recipe books and bent photographs of happier more peaceful times.

How I had tried and tried to convince her that I would change and that she shouldn't leave and that I needed her and would do whatever I had to to make her feel loved.

She had just shaken her head sadly, refusing to make eye contact as if the very contact would reduce her to a single, dead, weightless leaf falling and blowing aimlessly in the wind.

But she was much much stronger than that and me and she just put her head down, flipping yet one more page as she rapidly neared the end of this chapter, of this book eager to the go to the bookstore and buy a new one.

Deep down I knew that when her legs and feet carried her out of that door she would be gone forever. I could have been a statue or a mannequin or hibernating bear in my inability to halt her progress.

And now, on the phone weeks later, it was as if I didn't know her; had never known her.

The her I had known and loved and spent hours laying in her arms on bus rides and grass fields and my beat-up sofa were in the rearview mirror of a car speeding away at top speed as if it had just been involved in a bank robbery.

And I knew she was right. I had changed. I spent too many hours at work and with buddies playing golf and I had taken her for granted even though I always said that I wasn't and I never would.

In the back of my head, I thought she'd always be there until she wasn't.

"Please come back."

She paused and in that moment I could picture her crystal clear. Running her hand slowly through her hair, sitting in her wicker chair by a window, drinking coffee, picking the cranberries out of her cranberry walnut muffin with a wistful look on her beautiful face.

"Be well, Sam. I have to run."

And with that she hung up the phone and I was alone again leaning hard against the wall of the room that we had shared.

I needed to stop doing this to myself.

It was over.