Pity. Pity will begin to suffocate you from well meaning friends and acquaintances. Your life becomes neighborhood fodder, gossip of disbelief.

Your friends will pry you out of your house when they are gone on the weekends, when the other has left, when you are left alone, roaming an empty home that you carefully crafted to inspire warmth. The cold will hit you, knocking your breath away; more suffocation.

You will drink wine, watch old movies that remind you of a time of laughter, of comfort, of love. You will wonder if it was all a ruse. You will soon begin to discover it was in the end.

A panic attack will seize you, sneaking up on you as you push through your day, lecturing students on healthy relationships, on sex, on love. You know nothing anymore. It’s all a disjointed algebraic equation. The panic will creep until a stranger notices you trying to catch your breath. You will visit a doctor assuming stress is all there is and you will want to believe it. Compounding factors will leave you in a constant state of panic, juggling plates and plans while being aware you can only do so much. Only so much is failing.

Eventually it will calm. Sure, you might make mistakes. Sure, you might give yourself to much to easing the other person’s pain which might make you ignore your own. What do you do except continue on, I suppose.

Sometimes I find myself to be a veritable ace to the ideas of what makes a positive relationship but find myself silent, mute in the discussion that will surface.