Sounds at Night

12Jun09

Got this, interesting, anonymous post in the mail this week. Hardly a typical HBD post, but I enjoyed it enough to share with you, dear readers. Enjoy.

This is a transcript of an audio recording that my ex-girlfriend sent me to the night that she left to move to Texas for a new job.  We dated for a year, and at the time of her sending this to me, had been broken up for a month and a half.  Our breakup was quiet, she instigated, saying that with her leaving it was better to just let it go now, since I had never really wanted anything that was too serious.  We parted with small, wet, smiles.  I felt wounded, slightly the victim.

We didn’t speak much after that, although I thought about her all the time.  It was so odd to listen to this recording that she made.  I could tell she was speaking off the cuff, as her thoughts came to her.  Her words had a slow, sad quality, and her voice sounds beautiful to me, deepened by the obviously late hour and her fitful sleep.    When she says “maybe they’ll last.” her voice raises with the sweetest, hopeful note, which made me smile.  She always was so optimistic, so joyful about life and it was me that often tried to tamp that down.  I was wrong to let her go but it’s sort of obvious to me now how I pushed her away.

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A wail penetrates the darkness.  It’s ok.  I wasn’t sleeping. Just lying still with my eyes closed, thinking.  We never fought like that.

I can hear them, some man and some woman, in the darkness, in the city, outside my window…screaming at each other.  Some sort of argument…he did that…so she did this.  Now they’re having it out in some passionate quarrel.  You wonder…how things look on the other side of a fight like that.

He and I never really fought…in such a manner.  Our arguments…or our disagreements…about behavior, never escalated beyond a cool, logical conversation, and yet….and yet I think that it might have done us some good to have started screaming at each other, because then I wouldn’t feel this squirming in my gut now.  That we’re at the other side of the end of the relationship and I feel still so full…so full sometimes that I think I might…throw up from it all. All of these emotions that I have writhing around.

The argument continues for a while longer and I listen to the muffled sounds of the yells, occasional cursing, accusations, until it quietly dims down to the soft, full sobs of the woman and the quiet cooing of the man, now comforting her….and you think….maybe they’ll last.  The heartbreak of an argument that…sometimes is healed.

And me lying in my quiet bed, alone…knowing…that if I’m going to heal my own heartbreak…I had better start now.

Filed under: stories of heartbreak   |  1 Comment