Our Virtual Separation
It is so strange. Today I look at your face in the photos, and it looks like I don’t even know you. Just a tinge of familiarity, a trace of the affection I so harbored for that ravishing smile. It’s hard to admit, but it looks like a photo faded by time, by severe weather. I make an effort to remember before separating the timbre of your voice, the way you laughed at my nonsense. Of the pulsing, latent urgency that her body and face clearly acquired when they wanted me. I focus to recall our simple and numerous plans, our to-do lists for us to make together, the way I’ve often noticed you watching me.
I struggle to remember his tenderness, his concern, the way he held my hand, how he made me feel special. The worst thing is, the pain doesn’t come from remembering these things. But to see what a few months have already done with what we’ve lived: I look at your photos and I don’t recognize you. It takes an effort to remember those moments that we spent, that we smiled, that we sweated. Your presence is fading from me. That’s what hurts. I wasn’t ready, I’m not ready.
I wanted to detach myself from so many things and so many people these last few times, I cleaned up my emotional life, and I didn’t have the courage to put you in this old bag for donation. But, like it or not, time is master and it is relentless. The human brain has obvious memory limitations, I’ve heard it’s only 1 gigabyte. This HD doesn’t fit the small immense details of what I felt in each conversation, each extended hug, each touch of the mouth that I most wanted in my entire life; it doesn’t fit every terabyte of adrenaline when you (seemed) to love me so viscerally and truly in those hours in my noisy bed, lingering in endless excuses and amended schedules; not even every hundred megabytes of meaning I saw in life when we seemed so mentally and physically connected, so made to happen.
Yeah, but still good. Because that same 1 gigabyte won’t keep the details of my anguish either ; of its confused uncertainty; to hear from you, as someone who had no idea of the weight of what you were talking about, that you wanted me to be a mixture of myself with someone else, so that you could be completely happy; how I cried in a fetal position for hours, thinking a piece of me had been ripped off, how I didn’t remember feeling a long, long time ago; of feeling immensely stupid for having lived something alone (thinking living in 2); of having embittered silences of such cowardice; of being literally sick because of you, and thus being forced to carry you vivid inside me for longer than I wanted.
I wasn’t ready for our breakup
But I have to help my heart to reset once and for all these little scattered fragments of the sincere feeling that I cherished. Defrag my soul into pieces, feel like one again. I have to delete once and for all the remnants of infinite memory that technology makes possible, to make this blurry screen of emotions a new blank page, ready to reprogram my feelings for new moments worth my energy. And in that last inhuman memory that was missing to erase you from me, I give it today, my last goodbye.
