`Learning 2 Smile*

It's so painful, to break up with a person. To try to be 'just friends' and pretend you're only laughing as a friend when she cracks a joke. To try and pretend that you're okay, and to say you're okay and resist the urge to burst into tears when she asks if you are. To wish that her concern is something more, when she's just trying not to hurt you as much as possible. To watch her hands and you wonder, why is it that when you took her hand in yours, you never cherished the feeling of her palm, of her fingers that lace through yours and wrap over your hand, a protective seal that's now been torn off. To act nonchalant when she enters the room and comes over to talk to your group of friends, when you're really just anxious for her to catch your eye. To not notice when her hand touches yours when she passes, ever so slightly.

When every last damn fibre of your being wants to be hers so much that you'd kill yourself if it just won her freaking pity, but instead, you bury the picture of her and you under your pillow, fingers touching it so it won't disappear in the night like she did.

Instead, you pick up whatever dignity you have left, knowing that a word from her will send it falling down again. For months, years, you have lived your life as half of a perfect, whole couple, and now, you are forced to go on as just the half, making do with the shreds of her left behind, pieces of her which you now call, memories.

And you will cling to those memories fiercely as you do the shirt you let her wear, the smell of her that lingers on the shirts you were wearing the last time she hugged you, the little Neoprint stickers that you carefully pasted in your nicest notebook, where now the handwritten captions are smudged with tears. You will cling to the memories secretly, till someone else comes along, and you can throw the old letters, the shirt, the jewellery, the flattened rose, the ribbon that wrapped your birthday package.

But deep in your heart, a tiny pang of sorrow sweeps through with a hushed whisper, like the sound you think you hear when a candle flame dies. All that remains of that tiny hope for a love once lost, is gone. But the scars. oh the scars, they'll stay forever.