My Marianne

There is something far more bitter than a broken heart and that is the numbness that takes a hold soon thereafter.

In the very least the painful shards of heartache allow you the decency of feeling. Not so with the dullness. It weakens you in the deepest parts. There is suddenly no color left in the world, no flight of fancy or little joy to distract. Just him.

I can't say I think about him with regret now or remorse that things are as they're so. But I remember feeling. I remember the exhilaration of a word and that a hairsbreadth of movement would make me fall to his gaze; captured.

I remember those things.

There is solace in the memory that I once did feel love. If even unplanned for and with no future.

I am settled now. Ours was not to be.

I want to believe that it was simply part of a divine plan, one meant to lessen my delusions of romantic grandeur, to humble my heart to see reality as it were, as it is. All in order that I might see the true man ordained to have me. But I know of no reassurance.

For now, I feel nothing.