Day VI: Post Mr. E(nigma)

If every freckle and mole on your body is a wound carried from lifetimes before, then was I there in all of them, hunched over, tending you like the loyal fool I always am? Did I kiss those scars in a different century, call them badges of honor, stitch you together after yet another battle with the world? Tell me, in those other lives, did we bleed for the same cause, or was I just bleeding for you while you looked at the horizon, already planning your next departure?

Because the thought that drives me half-mad is this: what if I find you every time. What if I keep stumbling into you across the ages, lifetime after lifetime, like some cursed joke. One century we’re rebels, defying tyrants and feeding the poor. Another century we’re lovers pressed against walls in candlelit palaces. And in every version, I pour everything out of myself, and in every version you walk away when you’re full.

I wonder if I’ve healed you a thousand times only to be the wound that never closes. Did I bind your ribs with cloth during a revolution? Did I whisper courage into your ear before you charged into a hopeless fight? Did I bury you once, twice, ten thousand times, and then live on, still carrying the weight of your absence like it was part of my anatomy? Because that would explain why I feel so anciently tired, even now.

And what terrifies me is not that I lose you once, but that I lose you forever, again and again. That in every version of time, you are destined to walk away, and I am destined to stand in the ruins, immortal and ridiculous, drowning crops with my heartbreak. Maybe that is the true curse: not endless love, not endless giving, but endless repetition. Like reruns of the same tragedy, with me cast as the heroine who can’t stop auditioning.

So here I am, in this life, watching you go, wondering how many times we’ve done this dance. How many versions of you have left me. How many versions of me are still out there, weeping into their wine, asking the same stupid question: do I always find you? Do I always pour into you until I am empty, and then stand here, hollow, while Olympus laughs?

I think the answer is yes. Yes, I find you every time. And yes, you leave me every time. And yes, I will keep finding you, because immortality is cruel like that.

And then it hits me. Like a chisel to the skull. Like an oracle finally losing patience and screaming, “Girl, you’re embarrassing yourself.” Because let’s be clear: I am not weeping over a demigod. I am not immortalizing a legend. I am flooding the countryside over… a boy. A boy with a bookshelf full of philosophy primers and a savior complex bigger than his apartment. A boy who thinks breaking up with me is some noble sacrifice to protect his honor, as if he were handing Excalibur back to the Lady of the Lake instead of going no contact with me on a Sunday.

And me? I bought it. I took his melodrama and ran with it like a marathoner on steroids. I turned his exit into a Greek tragedy. I gave myself the starring role of The Goddess Abandoned, Act Three, Scene Infinite. I am standing here, immortal, with centuries of heartbreak behind me, sobbing into my diary like the Fates themselves just cut the thread…over a man whose grand legacy might amount to a neatly packaged training manual and a questionable choice in pants.

Do you understand the absurdity? Olympus doesn’t even need to mock me. I am doing the work for them. I am the roast. I am the entertainment. I am the goddess who could have been legendary, who could have gone down in history as divine, but instead I am crying in italics because a boy with lofty speeches and button-avoidant clothing decided to “save face.” I do not need enemies. I have myself.

So yes, he walked away. Yes, it hurt. Yes, I will write about it anyway, because it’s what I do. But let the record show: the real comedy is not his honor, not his big speeches, not even his almost philosophy degree. The real comedy is me, a walking weather catastrophe, spinning his exit into scripture when it should barely qualify as a footnote.

—SYL, Hopeless Romantic (Emphasis on Hopeless)