She sat crying as I comforted her.
Feeling her loss and wishing to ease her pain, I reached out to hold her, and our relationship ended as it began: quiet, unspoken, unconfirmed, recognized but unacknowledged, unsatisfying, and unknown to the world.
Her heart is not her own. It is not in my or anyone else's possession. She has lost it along the way, some here, some there, but now she is here and has none left for me.
We can feel it, what we would be, could be. It lingers in the air like too many tomorrows and taunts us. Wrong time, wrong place. I knew that. She knew that. What we had in knowledge we lacked in restraint. Now it might be gone, irrevocably changed, irreparably broken.
We are two pairs in one.
Sometimes she says she's two people, one on the inside and the other on the outside, and she can't feel what the other is doing. Now I am two people because she finally cut through me.
The part of me that cares about her rests his arm on her shoulders, comforting. The part of me that feels walks outside in the cold, dejected, regretful, stung fiercely but unable to complain, having seen his attacker's heart.
She did it again tonight.
She told me without telling me. The unspoken injury wallows in semi-secrecy, forced into darkness because her need is greater, because it was no surprise to me.
So we are two pairs.
We sit in sorrow and we sit in regret, in silence and in solitude, in understanding and in confusion.
We sit together and we sit apart.