Sounds a heart makes when it breaks.

Drowning.

Make no mistake, there is no water here.

Its like when you left you took along all the oxygen, suffocating me with your absence.

So I immersed myself in self destruction, poison my only comfort.

What does such a thing sound like?

Well, it sounds like the same re runs I've seen a thousand times.

It sounds like soft sobs and deafening cries,

Muffled only by the tear soaked T shirt you left behind.

Sloshing of whiskey, and the clinking of empty bottles as they begin to form a shameful, toxic mound.

Phone ringing repeatedly until that final call leaves me unemployed.

Predictable, pitiful, I know heartbreak is nothing new.

My walls hear questions but no answers. Relentlessly I beg to understand.

Desperate attempts to neglect the mark you left on my heart,

My walls hear strange voices and pizza deliveries.

More reverberating bottles accompany unfamiliar exclamations of pleasure from forgettable men.

My walls remember the lectures of a well meaning mother attempting to ease the heart.

For months my walls heard the sounds of heartache, as it means to me.

But finally, a bit of laughter.

The first signs of healing from those emotional wounds you bludgeoned me with.

Music.

Poetry.

Friendship.

Love.

The sound of pencil scribbles on paper, Im writing again.

Exploring again. Living again.

No longer am I drowning but instead I am breathing.

Im finally able to breath without choking on the thought of you,

And that first breath after such an aggressive flood of grief,

that breath was like the first day of my brand new life without your stamp on it.

My lungs fill with air and release all the pain, all the memories, the promises.

Ill never forget you,

But I will never again let you be the reason I breathe.