Excising The Scars

 How do you say goodbye?

    How do you learn to move on from a wound that has been a part of you for so long? When every moment since the time that scar formed... when that pain has been a lingering nuisance in the subconscious for so long... how do you let go?

I can't forget those moments together.

    Not the grandiose ones of parties or birthdays or revelry....

        but just the plain simple moments where the world was quiet around us and there was just the sound of us...

            ...breathing.

I don't recognized the face that looks back at me in the mirror. 

So many lines, so many grey hairs that weren't there when it mattered.

And yet I know it's me.

I sit by a river that was never ours, but a place that has become my solace. I read and listen to the wails of frustrated geese and taste the scent the industrial waterway before me, the people milling about, the heavy roadways riding like artificial arteries across the way and I find myself suspended.

        Am I still there,

            or are we still going to be here?

I can't really remember myself before you.

    Is this me even a thing without you?

    

        But I can't sit by the river forever.

Time has that nasty habit of continuing on. Just like that churning Merrimack before me, it pushes forward... cascading over islets and downed branches and boulders and buried hopes. The push of the current never ceases.

Night falls over this quiet extinct city. The sounds of life and love and joy and misery and memory resonate like shockwaves throughout the empty cold twilight. I watch the few passersby pass by, their aimless strangling a beautiful bob in the ebb, the serene bliss of those momentary distractions.

I'm not who I used to be. Neither are you.

    We are not anymore.

As the sky darkens and the stars fall and that condescending crescent grin moves higher over the settling night, I stow my book and I stare out at the onyx paint slick that has become the river.

I can't see it anymore... but I can still hear it.

I can't see you anymore. I can't see what we were anymore.

I'm not sure I can hear it anymore either.

But I hold that sound.

I look up at stars that I see alone.

I feel that scar on my arm from that night.

I look up and I see an empty void.

I'll cary these scars forever.

But I can't rely on them anymore.

The river has continued on,

the waters are now different.