David told me that all beautiful things break.
I wish that I could hate him, but I know the jagged scars he bears, the broken paths that brought him to my door. You can’t help but feel pity for a life that couldn’t have gone any other way, that struggled so hard against the odds and lost.
We met on the steps of the museum. I was smoking a cigarette after my shift, wishing I could quit with the idle determination of a thought with no will behind it. He asked to borrow my light, and when he struck up a conversation I didn’t feel my usual urge to shut it down, hurry back into solitude. He had the greyest matte eyes I had ever seen, with long blond lashes and almost invisible eyebrows. Not handsome so much as striking, his jaw just a little too straight, his nose broken and healed crooked. He talked about the world like it was a stranger, and I marvelled at the way I could impress him with a few fast facts.
We’d been seeing each other for three months when I bought him canvases and paints. He talked often of wanting to draw, but no one had ever told him he could. No one had ever suggested he could take up a brush, pick up paint, that his hands might be good for building something. The results were, dare I say, disastrous; we laughed and then cried together, in my speckled living room, and he told me that not everyone can make something beautiful.
We’d been dating for half a year when I found the used syringes in his bathroom garbage can. I think he meant for me to find them, though he always swore he didn’t. I think he wanted the cleansing pain of castigation and absolution, the sobbing fight, the blissful release of truth. I never lived more than in that moment when I held him in my arms, and we promised to each other that this was a road we would walk together; strange how our memories often put pain so far above beauty.
Everyone told me I was making a mistake, but who listens to everyone?
We’d been together one year, one attempt at rehab, one terrified midnight phone call from the hospital, and one near-breakup when he told me about his family. I have never hurt more than when I hurt for him, imagining a small child that alone. I had never, not once in my life, been without a safety net, and here he had spent every moment a thousand feet in the air. There was freedom in it but terror, too, and terror wears on the soul.
We’d been together three years when he told me that he didn’t want to try anymore; that he couldn’t stand the pain he caused me but he couldn’t, he simply couldn’t, stop. They say that love makes you want to be the perfect version of yourself, so you can live up to the person your lover sees when they look at you; the version of him I saw was too daunting, too beautiful, and he didn’t know how to meet it halfway.
He told me that all beautiful things break, and I couldn’t make him believe it wasn’t true. I wanted to hate him, wanted to blame him for every tear, every phone call, every late night, every early morning, every hospital trip and every used syringe. But he’s wrong. Not every beautiful thing breaks – and years from now, I will still have our beautiful memories, and when the pain fades they will shine all the brighter. We made beauty together.
I just wish I could convince him that was true.
Image courtesy of Hayley Mechelle Bouchard. Her work can be found at Little Cat Photography, with more information about Hayley on Our Contributors page.