"You have killed all that"

Before I can stop her, she's telling me something about an ex that I absolutely know I do not want to fucking hear. The kind of thing that will shatter the image I have of her in my mind irrevocably.
She's knocked the picture off the shelf before as we all do....I've picked it up and though the glass plate was cracked, it was still beautiful.
This time the frame breaks and the glass shatters and it's just too many pieces to even consider picking up because in that instant you see all the tiny slivers of class that are almost powder size and cannot be picked back up nor fitted back in place. You just sweep them under a rug, a couch or wherever.

I don't say anything. My heart withdraws deep inside, and a chasm opens up between her and I though her small hand pulls at my side and the other is running through my hair I feel nothing but desolation and a knot in my throat. 

"Say something. Please."
"There's nothing to say."
"I adore you. Just you. I need and want only you.
"You have killed all that."

"Please don't let this change things between us."
"We had something special, something unique and rare. You have besmirched it with your need to be honest about what? Who? Some fucking guy? Something, someone from the past that shouldn't even fucking matter in the slightest if you've come to me with an open heart as I asked you when we first met and we started opening up to one another. My mark would have been upon you. I would have made you magnificent, on my arm, my woman. You would have been envied."

I don't leave because I don't need to make a statement. I don't need to draw her too me. I don't need to flip the script. I could do one of 20 things to have her eating from my hand....but I don't because I just don't care. She has driven from my any attachment I might have felt.

I'm too tired to drive to my place.
I don't feel anything but shock and disappointment that she has likely killed this beautiful thing we had with her silly need for catharsis by telling me something I would have no rational need nor desire to know. I'm emotionally exhausted and hollow so I sleep.
----

I wake up before her and consider just getting dressed and leaving without a word.
I touch her face and she stirs ever so slightly but it is not warm in the way I remember.

When I was younger I would have left abruptly making some dramatic fucking scene the girl world  narrative of TV expects and demands that childishly equates to love and romance and depth of emotion but is truly just juvenile pandering to the id and flawed Byronic hero elements of desire......I would have enacted some script to manipulate and the like...but I'm a half step slower and.....I just let go because....I don't know. I'm tired.

My heart is not as elastic as it used to be.
They talk a lot about the pedestal in TRP and all that noise...but the pedestal is also the illusion, the joy, the potential, the perfection.....the beauty of the ideal of a woman. I don't want to lose that no matter how many times I attempt to enforce potentially impossible and disappointment-laden expectations on another human. That pedestal is how I lavish the thick, deep, evocative desire and affection which is the hallmark of my lust and love and desire.

Wordlessly, I feel the absence of emotion, knew this is always how it would turn out, curse myself for forgetting the nature of the beast, but deep down, a small part of me was glad to find out I could care again...and yet....in this moment, I am simply occupying the center of the black hole where once existed a bright, smoldering, shining star: brilliant in its glory and radiance. I can no longer even see the dead star's dying light shining in the night sky. It has already faded from my sight. I cannot see it nor feel it.

The gravity of this feels crushing and my throat hurts and my arms feel light with that feeling of grief only those men who truly adore women can know.

Good luck and happy hunting,
        - Yrs. in Christ