Blog Swap: I Will Wait For You, But Please Come Soon

Today's guest poster will remain anonymous.

When I come home each night, pausing at the garage gate as I wait for it to open, I look up at the balcony and I see you leaning over and smiling at me. Your eyes are wide and happy. You're waving to me to hurry up. Park the car, come inside. We'll kiss each other hello, I'll run my hands through your hair. You'll throw some food on the grill (baby back ribs, please), I'll make the side dish (mashed potatoes with tons of garlic, of course) and we'll enjoy a bottle of wine outside while we talk about our days and learn new things about each other. We'll make each other laugh. Hurry up, get up here, now. I can't wait to see you.

But you're not really there. You're a ghost. You left weeks ago to get your head together because your demons were destroying you from the inside out, eating both of us alive. I can still feel your presence as palpably as I did the day you left, no matter what I do. I hear a joke, and it's your laugh that rings in my ears. I wake up in the morning and I feel you next to me in bed, but your shape disappears when I go to curl myself around you. I leave the gym, and I look across the street. You're sitting at one of the café tables at the coffee shop, reading a book and waiting for me. You've bought an iced coffee, and we share it.

You're everywhere.

The comforts these visions of you bring are only temporary ones. I have you and lose you over and over again, every single day. I am addicted to the way my heart swells when I feel your presence, when I remember the way your thighs or your hands or the nape of your neck feel, the way your voice sounds when I walk through the front door and you say, "Hey, Sugarpop!" but coming down from the high is a devastating experience. And yet, I can't stop it. I don't want to stop it. I don't ever want to have to work to recall the bliss I felt when you were near.

I don't think you understand or believe how achingly I miss you. I don't think you understand how you destroy my heart when I cry and say, "I miss you. I miss you so much" and my pain and honesty are met with the hum of my cordless phone. Sometimes you say, "Look, I just called to catch up." It's then that I wonder if you must hate me, and what it was that I did. You were once so kind and now I don't know you. Your heart is hard, and I've never seen you this way. We were best friends. Not in the cliched way couples say that. No, you were my best friend. The person I always ran to when something happened. The first person I wanted to tell something. The only person who could cheer me up when I was sad. You made me laugh to the point of tears. You were -- you are -- my favorite person in the world. I love talking about you and anyone who knows me could see it. I was completely taken. We made a lot of people sick.

I don't feel that I have the right to ask you how you feel about me, so I don't. Do you still love me? Do you think about me as much as I think about you? I don't think you know how much I would die to hear those words from you again. I don't think you know that I would prefer to be stabbed repeatedly over this. It wouldn't hurt nearly as much. I know you're in pain, too. I want to fix you. I want you to be you again, I want you to be okay and I want you to be everything I know you can be, if only you would believe in yourself and see yourself the way I see you. If you saw yourself with my eyes, you would know you can do anything. You would never doubt yourself.

I wonder if I should move on. I've pondered the idea an uncomfortable number of times. But each time, I reach the same conclusion: I can't. You have to destroy us, because I never will. I believe in us. I believe in you. I believe what we had together was as good as it could ever get. You made me a better person, you brought out the best things in me. I like to think I did the same for you. We look out for each other. We were a team and I liked how we were both so openly committed to that. I loved how we worked together, how we compromised. You made me believe again. You made me unafraid to go after the things I wanted and unafraid to be me. You reveled in the things about me that I never thought anyone had noticed. And I reveled in everything about you, even the things you suspected I disliked about you (you were wrong). I put you first. I have never felt a love so full and real that nothing could destroy it or alter it.

I am yours to destroy, baby. My heart belongs to you and no one else. And it scares me to death. But the thought that you might never be in my life again scares me so much more, because you are my match. If I am not yours, I am no one's.

I'll keep waiting for you until you come home. I'll keep looking up and seeing your smiling face and maybe someday soon, you won't be just a ghost anymore.