His Scandalous Bride

21: Letter 7

December 12th, 2007

I have been searching my memories for traces of you. It is quite strange but lately, I have become forgetful. Moments I thought were indestructible lay flattened from the ordeals of merely existing and feelings, those overwhelmingly beautiful feelings, we once shared which felt endless are now a harrowing echo.

I'm not saying I can't remember. I'm not saying the love ain't there. There are stories I keep telling and retelling myself. The memory of a feeling. The echo of a touch. The sigh of a dream. The darkness of a lingering fear. I remember. I just don't trust my memory. I feel the love. I just don't trust the love.

"I have never wanted anything as much as I want you,"You'd begged on that day I told you I can't marry you and in a blazing desperation I never want to ever experience you'd said. . .

"Please. . .,"

Just a word. Please. And nothing.

Please what? Please stay? Please don't leave? Please choose me? I keep playing and replaying that moment wondering why you couldn't see how I break. Please. . . Please what?  Please I am a bastard and my best friend knows? Or is it please I didn't know my best friend is obsessed with you? You had begged me to stay. I had begged him to let me go. Neither of us got we wanted.

"You can't be with him, Jiddah, not him." Your best friend had threatened me. "Anyone but him."

What did you tell me? He is your favorite person alive? What a joke! How can you love someone as vile as him? How can't you see how much he covets that which is yours? It was the same on that night we met. It has been the same ever since. It was as if everywhere I looked he was there, suffocating the life out of me. But you never saw. It was something you couldn't even imagine I guess. How can you? He was the person you trusted the most.

"I have never loved anything as much as I love you, Jiddah." I hate this word. Love. I hate that something as beautiful as what we felt could be used to torment us. I hate that someone like him could feel such a sacred emotion. He doesn't deserve it. He deserves nothing.

Do you know something funny? His claims that what he feels is love. 'I have never loved anything as much as I love you'. What a joke! How can it be love? How can this man who had not just destroyed my life, but my soul and laid to waste my heart had done it for love?

"No one can love you as much as I do, Jiddah. No one." He says. "You might not believe me but it is the greatest truth of my life." He says.

He loves me but chose to marry me on the sly? He loves me but made me betray the love and trust of my parents? He loves me but he made me lose you? What kind of love is this that just takes, and takes, and takes? I lost everything for this love and for what? I am miserable. I have been since that morning I left you.

"It was never my intention to hurt you." He says. "It was never my intent to hurt him." He says. "Why can't you see how hurt I am?" He asks. "Why can't you see me?" He asks.

Why should I care about how hurt he is when he broke me first?

"I don't resent you," You said. "I can't resent you." But I do. I resent you. I blame you for my messed up life. I hate you for not protecting yourself. I detest you for your heart. I loathe you for the same reasons I love you.

And I loved you. Totally.

And now, I have scars on my heart; a wound that seeps through the bloodstream indistinguishable from the flow of life. I am in pain. But mostly, pain is in me. I struggle. To remember. To forget. Life would become easier without these mongering emotions. I know. But I am nothing without them. It's a memory. It is just a memory. You are just a memory. But I am nothing without them. I am nothing without you.

Yours,
J.A.Y