• I'm sorry for springing it on you without preamble. For ending every call with "I love you", up to the very last. I guess I just didn't know how to say it on the phone, so I waited. I waited until the words burned in my mouth, poison burrs. Until it was spit them out or perish. Perhaps I waited too long and they came out jumbled, as scatterbrained as your condescending laughs and "Oh, honey's" accused me of being.
    I'm sorry for remembering it too perfectly; the minty bite of your toothpaste, sharp like the knives too close for comfort at such a time. That jagged spike of fear zipping through my body screaming "Don't do this, turn back, I can't be alone!" Tears tracing lines of salt down the breast of my black jacket. Your sigh of exasperation at my latest folly. Disbelief and annoyance jockeying for position on your face.
    Yes, this time it was real. Not a joke, not a break, not a power play. Rather simply, an end. A resigned "I'm sorry, I can't do this anymore." And your expression finally stopped changing channels, settling on shut-down mode. All signs of what we had once shared stricken from the record and replaced with a look that said "Goodbye." The last look I would ever see on the face I had woken up to so many times.
    And I'm sorry that after four years all you had to say was "We had a good run." Like we were another one of your vehicles that you crashed, always trying to race through life. But, then again, you cried over your cars. You didn't do that over us. Stoic as ever, my Captain America. "So this is what you really want?" There you sat, lacing up your ratty old boots. Not invested in the answer, just confirming the status. Strapping yourself in for the next mission. I don't think it would have mattered what I said after that; you were already gone.
    So I'm sorry that I wasn't your great love. Or your good love. Or even your love at all. Sometimes, I'm even sorry that you weren't mine. But mostly I'm sorry that I stayed so long when neither one of us really cared at all.