There were three glass jars on the table. Inside the tallest one, dry branches stretched out like arthritic fingers, clawing at the heavy afternoon air. A few small stones rested at the base, heavy with the terrifying stillness of things that simply exist.

I looked at him, and he was no longer a man; he was merely a fact. A hard, dense fact that I had allowed to block my view of the horizon.

Leave him, let him go.

The words came from outside, or perhaps from the deepest, most silent core of my stomach, where hunger turns into truth. To stay would be to perform a role—the modern tragedy of the “crazy ex-girlfriend,” or worse, the tame comfort of a shoulder to cry on. How vulgar it is to be useful. How humiliating to realize that I had become an instrument for his self-reflection, a mere story he could tell someone he wanted to impress, an “ego boost” to dress up his naked emptiness. I was giving away my blood to paint his portrait.

I felt the sudden, violent necessity of a clean break. Not out of pride, but out of a desperate need to reclaim my own breathing.

To walk away with my head held high is a difficult posture; it forces the spine to remember it is made of bone, not liquid submission. Do not give him another second of your time. Time is not a watch ticking; it is a creature eating away at us.

I know I love him. Or rather, I love the laceration he causes in me, a love so heavy that every step away is a small, internal murder. Each step kills a version of me that existed only through his eyes. But this—this precise, agonizing moment—is the birth of something raw. It is the terrifying instant where the ego shatters and you put yourself first. Not out of selfishness, but out of a raw, animal instinct to survive.

I must go and make something beautiful of my life. Not a beautiful object, but a beautiful state of being—vibrant, terrifying, and completely free. One day, the promise goes, I will forget he was ever there. The memory will erode until he becomes like those stones in the jar: present, but entirely disconnected from the secret current of my life.

© Beatriz Esmer