A Broken Promises Stella Samuel Short
A promise broken leaks from her eyes and runs down her skin into the puddle she’ll melt into if left unattended.
In their precise spot, she waited. 33 18 and 12.2° N crossed with 111° 50 and 33 W, as she’d memorized the exact spot where their first promise sealed every moment’s pleasure and fear from the start. As long as they didn’t need to meet against that very column, they’d fight to work together permitting the bonds of adoration and respect to hold tight onto the solemn vow they’d made. If trouble arose, they’d meet to expose their fears, frustrations, and quandaries to the light of day staying under the stars if that’s what it took to listen, uncover, and heal.
Only, the letting go occurred on a couch a few coordinates away, so close, completely missed from space and almost overlooked from home. Sharing troubles and building trust with love’s mistress was never in the promise, nor the plan. Knocked over, blindsided, faith lost, and a sacred promise broken, cracked love’s foundation rippling their core.
Standing in place, firm in her position of love’s unbreakable bond, she touched the column. Cool from the night air, the day’s heat still emanated from beneath paint worn from the years. Those they spent not needing to meet in the very spot, not even with the need to memorize the exact numbers behind the same degrees of latitude.
“This is where you will find me should we ever get lost.”
She waited. Each day blocking out her path on the 33rd parallel North, never losing hope. She wrote love notes — new promises to engage, fight through personal trauma, and an evoked appreciation of what once was with resounding faith of what will be again. Time passed slowly. Alone.
Faith diminished. Weakness overtook emotion and power as she spiraled down. Each day, never breaking her promise, she paced the path they’d walked together with love in her heart and words on her lips. She showed ready to fight. Gathering the strength to face each day alone, her promise never wavering.
Just across the 33rd parallel North, love’s letting go had begun. No rhyme. No reason. Just gone. Love’s go may have begun with a question. An influence. Maybe a concern. Possibly a fear. The act of letting go occurred in a bubble void of the promise love had made to face the difficult head on at one exact spot on Earth. The spot only the two of them knew.
Instead, love trusted another, giving it away with the ease of patterns carved from all love’s befores. Sharing vulnerability, the purest form of crisp, clean love, outside of promise developed the idea that a gift can be taken back, broken without consequence.
Ending the daily trip to their column, bitter acceptance filled her void. Love didn’t come home. Waking each day empty, wishing only to not wake at all, she flipped between giving up and fighting harder. Love didn’t come home. Distance only brought more yearning, a face covered in snot and tears. Love didn’t come home. More emptiness. Love avoided. More questions. Love laughed in her face. The idea that hope can live anywhere, even in the darkest of days, the driest of climates, the toughest of moments, love broke. Love didn’t come home.
Fear enveloped her, following her like a shadow, even in the dark. Love remained in her heart. Surrounded by remnants of love, she flailed between the light of hope and the dark of loss. Selfless in thoughts, she yearned to give. Gifts of space, of time, distance to heal. Selfish was love’s reply, taking a mistress with reckless abandon, fragments of love lying in cold spaces no longer touched.
No time to think, plan, hurry to worry, love skipped new beats, light and weightless without concern for that which lie in dark corners. As the letting go began down the 33rd parallel, life itself dismantled inside the souls just beyond love’s selfish reach. But love, blind not pure, took no note wrapped inside the fresh meadows of life anew.
Left behind love’s abandon, the purest of souls ache for understanding. A resonating touch and a walk down memory’s lane before love moved in. Purity forgets innocence and solicits thought-provoking times before. Simple memories of before love, but only snapshots. To lose so suddenly without promise to endure, a devastating cost. As such, she cannot help, cannot replace love, and barely notices outside of her own trauma just how much love absorbed in its time on these tracks. Until innocence asks to be carried through the darkness and back into the light to grow again without the tender touch of love misplaced, mistaken, misunderstood.
It’s this moment, in sacred trust, she awakens to her own power. The power to give back innocence with apologies tangled in tears and patterns repeating in the open air. Not what is missed but what was trusted, that’s where it hurts them, she and innocence, most.
Together, they question what was real, genuine, authentic, and how, if any of it were ever true and pure, it could walk out on a rainbow leaving the rubble from the storm behind.
Stacks of mail. Everyday items. Scents. Pieces of love chilling, growing colder, holding her accountable still. Love took a clean break leaving it all behind, the name, the address, the things that made love live inside these walls… it’s all still under her roof, while love plays beneath a different star.
Innocence’s loss shifts to anger. Its mentor before still riding the thin rail of what-ifs perched on bridges afire. There’s no telling how the story will end. Passion’s promise broken. Innocence forgotten, left behind. Her vows tattooed deep into her skin never to forget the 33rd parallel. She’ll look for love again, not today, at the column where it all began…
The silence grew loud…
The emptiness heavy…
The anger tenacious.
But it didn’t start that way. Love was beautiful. Love was kind. Love was patient. Love was vulnerable. In the days of light and mercy, love melted into her with unscathed passion on a beautiful summer day.
Read Part 2 here.
~Stella Samuel
2021