Fragments

When you mend the patches of my clothin'
You know every thread goes through my heart
Guessin' that the river's gonna dry up
Well, I said that's not the reason why we part....
"The Sparrow and the Medicine" ~  The Tallest Man on Earth
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When you break something fragile, pieces go everywhere.  If you've ever dropped a glass in your kitchen, you know this all too well, probably.  Even after carefully sweeping and getting into all the corners, if you're not very, very careful, at some point a careless foot will encounter that one remaining fragment.

It's like that when a relationship ends.  I'm not necessarily talking about romance, although certainly it applies to that.  When any sort of relationship that means anything ends, there are always bits of it floating around waiting to catch you when you're not quite paying attention.  Right now, for me, it definitely wasn't a romance that ended (nothing could have been farther from it if it had been trying), but it was a friendship that meant something to me, at least.  And now that it's apparently gone, the pieces of it that are still skittering around on the kitchen floor despite my best efforts at sweeping up bother me profoundly.

The music is the worst right now.  There's so much of it that I love that got attached to that particular situation, that particular person, and now I have to reclaim it, remake it, find a new way to go on with it.  Some of it I am just staying away from altogether for awhile.  I will come back to it again, I am sure, and when I do, the absence perhaps will have made my heart grow clichedly fonder.

It's not just the music, though.  There are little shining fragments everywhere.  Topics of conversation.  Books.  Movies.  I hate that.  I hate that I see things and think, "Oh, I should tell...."  and then I remember that this is not something that happens anymore.  I hate that the reflexive action to share things is still active. I hate that things I love are now always going to be tied to this...ending.

And when I think about the why...  There wasn't even an open disagreement. I would have felt better if there had been a loud shouty fight. At least, then, there could have been a legitimate and honest ending.  Instead, there is just this tacit absolute silence that has grown to the point of being something lethal.  Sometimes nothing is more deadly than anything else.  There are many kinds of silences.  There is the companionable and pleasant kind, there is the polite but attentive kind that tolerates, and then there is the f-you kind.  We're over into that last kind.  It frequently makes me frustrated and angry, mostly with myself I guess, for making such an error in judgement and allowing someone to get close enough to me to matter when they were gone.

I tend to hold on to my friends.  Even if our lives change, I usually find a way to keep up with them somehow when they matter and are not just acquaintances.  My group of true friends is small, and I've had most of them for a very long time.  I don't do the whole casual cloud of millions thing.  I have only lost one or two who I considered close over the years, moved away from them or our lives just changed completely and by mutual agreement we stopped talking.  This, I guess, is going to wind up in that file.  I  I just wonder how long I'm going to keep cutting myself accidentally on the fragments of regret left behind.