Delilah

               I cannot listen to this song anymore. It’s one of my break up songs. It’s from someone I will always be in love with. After four and a half years I gave up. He is someone I will always come back to; my life always circles around back to him, whether I like it or not. I told him I would be the one who got away, and a few days ago he told me I was right.

               My husband showed me a poem he wrote about me one day when I was being frustrating, which I often am. The poem hit home somewhere, at least the first and last stanzas, which I know was not Rick’s intention [which it did not want me to separate on here, thus the tick marks]:

               She doesn’t love Batman
                              she loves the Joker
               Those flashy suits
                              and wild wisps of green
               Painted lips and face and
                              Tainted heart
-

               So here I go,
                              disciple of Bane
                                             looking to complete
                              what her Joker could not
               closest to the finish line
               carving out my name
               in the skyline
-

               But once again:
                              she doesn’t hate Batman
                              she loves the Joker

I love Harley Quinn. She is one of my favorite cartoon characters, and I can really relate to her. I know about loving a man who is insane, and can’t help but break your heart time and again. Who betrays you, and hurts you, and leaves you in the cold. I know those feelings intimately, and I have never been able to stop loving him.

               He was bipolar/manic depressive. He had issues with substance abuse. He had problems with his faith. He couldn’t hold down a job. He couldn’t stay in school. He couldn’t give me the space I needed when I was angry. He refused to go into counseling. And I felt like Ellen Dolan from The Spirit, “You're in love with every woman you meet, Mr. Spirit. You say lovely things to all of us and you mean every word you say.” So after a four year friendship, where he pursued me the entire time, and seven months of dating and starting to talk about getting married, I broke up with him. He still took me to Monster Trucks for my birthday weeks later, and gave me a ride home from college that summer. Then we stopped speaking. Ironically, it was because of him my husband and I got as close as we did just after we met. After months of not speaking, he called me one night. We talked, and then I cried into Rick’s shoulder for hours.

               In high school he made me an oil pastel drawing of his heart, and asked me to keep it safe. Years later he did a second “updated” one. I still have it. I’ll always have his heart. And just a little bit, he’ll have part of mine.

               I wish I had never cut his hair.

Peter Patrick pitter patters on the window
And Sunny Silhouette won't let him in
and poor old Pete's got nothin 'cause he's been fallin'
but somehow Sunny knows just where he's been
He thinks that singin' on a Sunday's gonna save his soul
but now that Saturday's gone
Well sometimes he thinks that he's on his way
but I can see, that his break lights are on

-Jack Johnson

Picture by Kuroi-Tsuki