Abandonment

Abandonment. Abandonment is hard, it is like forgetting a name you were never suppose to remember or a heart that claimed you were never apart of it. For so long i never knew what abandonment felt like, even though I felt it so much. It is funny how labels sneak up on you like that, calling it what it is almost worse than the experience, a judgment and a definition. For who gets abandoned but the people who were never good enough in the first place?
           It is hard to remember the memories of would haves and should have beens, with other men and different places, when I knew they were leaving, I could smell it on them, like I could smell the rain, see it in their grimy voices as they talked about problems and I remembered it in that absent feeling when I was searching for hope again, and yet even though they left me unexpected and jarred I hadn't thought to myself I was being abandoned, I just thought it was them, the men who no one ever sees, the mysteries that somehow attack women from behind.
             It is hard I guess, life, how it comes with a cry like a child, but yet it grows independent of what we want it to become. as a woman you have to change to adhere to the world, get a softer voice, call your self stupid, laugh for no apparent reason, and know your laughter is always taken as your plea bargain, defense and last stand when justice comes and loneliness appears, and there is nothing on the horizon but the melted off sun.
            I would never have thought I would be abandoned, not as a child and not as an adult. I would have thought I would grown eight arms, with chains, ten heads that can answer any question, a heart that moved so fast it was a blur. and yet when I look into my past I can recall all the sour notes of feeling hurt and not knowing why, of reaching for clarity and love and coming up short, staring a man in the eyes and begging him not to go, only to watch him leave back to the woman in his imagination, she had already won. There was no escaping a possibility.
            I had thought for so long I was pretty, or I was witty, or I could outsmart men enough to make them stay close to me, explain to them their day dreams and the weather, and they would believe me, they would need me, like I need me, like they need water. but love becomes so slick, it slips right through us, and I watch it like a hawk as it stare at me from above, with its overview of life, of me, as it knows its course even before it began, like a drop of water knows the stream. and I scream out to heaven again, that this man is different, these conversations we have, the attention I hold, the look in my eye, the need in my heart, it has all changed from before, from last time he came. but mother nature knows all my wounds by heart, she knows all my hidden agenda and like a beast from the dark corner she will come. With my guard down, I will watch it all in slow motion, the man I used to know change again, back into reality, back into his day dreams and his work clothes, as he sees me as just another object to fit his happiness inside. and I watch myself put on the same uniform I have always had, somewhere in my closet, the uniform that has followed me around since I can remember, of watching the world divide me from a creation of mankind into a woman.