If you love me, meet me by the clocktower at 3pm.
Ultimatums are idiotic.
Or maybe I am.
Ultimatums are idiotic, and so am I. If you love me, as if a person can’t love you despite themselves, as if a person can’t love you and still break up with you at three a.m. after a fight that lasted seven hours, two meals, one reconciliation, one phone call from work taken and one from family ignored, five rooms, two apartments, and nine – count them, nine – insults that you remember three days later in a way you know means you will never forget them, that when you’re drunk and feeling vulnerable they will crawl back up like acid reflux in your brain, eating tiny holes in the fabric of your self-esteem.
If you love me. I could have said – if you think we can still make this work – and then when I was standing here forty-five minutes after three p.m. and she was nowhere in sight I wouldn’t be going through every minute we spent together wondering, was that when she stopped loving me? Was it the day she performed a piece of poetry in front of a crowd who heckled and jeered and she laughed along and then cried quietly in the bathroom, mascara tracks down her cheeks, while I sat in a meeting with my chin on my fist dreaming of the big promotion I wouldn’t get? Was it the time her mother called and I answered her cell and forgot to take a message? Was it that moment when we lay in bed together, our ankles twisted under the sheets, and I told her that I had never, not once in my entire life, been happier?
They do it in the movies all the time. If you love me, light a candle in your window and I’ll know you still care. If you love me, meet me in the spot where we first kissed. If you love me… and they always come. Sometimes it’s just to say goodbye. Just to break your heart, just to say I will always love you, but – just to say sometimes love isn’t enough. But you get your tearful goodbye, you get your farewell in the rain, you get more than ‘I’m so tired,’ more than, ‘I just can’t do this anymore’ but you don’t know if she means this, this fight you’re having, this, this moment, this, this pearl on the string or if she means the whole necklace, if she means you and I.
If you love me. And I am an idiot. Or maybe ultimatums are.
If you love me, and your absence is the answer to the question I wish I could unask. If you love me – or if you don’t.
Image courtesy of Hayley Mechelle Bouchard. Her work can be found at Little Cat Photography, with more information about Hayley on Our Contributors page.