The Man That Was Poem by grace mariner

I sleep alone each night,
with the enemy at my side.
Raw emotion makes easy prey for this wicked thing that taunts me.
It lives within my ancient ear, whispering words of loss and despair.
All the while laughing at the anguish it brings.
It plunges me into a sea of sharks and cuts me with razor sharp words and I am torn to shreds.
Has it been 12 weeks?
I'm not sure as it is endured hour to hour, moment to moment.
The hollowness you left in me feels somehow different tonight.
Strange.
Is it acceptance, doubtful as the wound still festers.
Is it tolerance, the recognition of what can and cannot change?
I'm not sure.
You ran from our last dance together, leaving me alone on the floor,
the sad words of that song flowing into my heart.
Was this a dream, or the product of a deranged mind?
Perhaps you didn't exist, created by my current bed mate for his own amusement, reminding me of what can never be mine.
Were those words, those touches, those looks ever real?
If I answer yes, if I acknowledge that you were of flesh and blood like myself, then the greater question must be asked...
how does the sweetest lover turn into a venom spitting cobra?
Oh how tragic a thing it is to doubt your own reality!
A cruel trick of unearthly proportions!
So I struggle daily to recall that lovely face...
real or imagined.
Never being entitled to love you, I could never be entitled to lose you.
Never owned, but loved nonetheless, I retrace my steps in time, always searching, always longing,
for what was never mine to lose.
And there are tokens.
Relics left behind, tangible charms that reassure me you were real,
and that you are gone.
I can still see the man I love...
strong, arrogant, confident but with a damaged child within.
You were mine, right or wrong, for a moment suspended in time.
So many years waiting for you my giant, my beautiful monster,
only to lose you after such a brief interlude.
The sadness is all consuming to me as I awaken to hear your whisper in the night, only to realize it is the trickster, mocking my loss,
stimulating my desire for what is no more.
And he cackles and laughs at his atrocity, knowing all too well the story's ending before it was even written.
And the small parts of me left unscathed by this life were taken with you when you left.
Perhaps that is why that hollowness, that emptiness grows.
And you remain my beautiful giant, always cautious, always afraid of drowning in the intensity of my vast emotional sea.
My wounded child.
My usurious villain.
My emotional cripple.
My sweetest love.
You were all of these.
And I, never being cautious, drown daily in the vastness that is you,
the depth imperceptible, never able to touch the bottom, the trickster, my enemy, holding me under with the weight of my loss.
I asked you for emotion when you had to leave.
Perhaps I should have been more specific.
No blame my inept giant, my blue eyed lover.
This demon in my bed knew from the start that this was damaged at its very conception.