If I could even, if I wanted to, get over YOU. The things about YOU. Your real qualities that I love and miss, rather than just the idea of a relationship as a whole. If I could forget the way you said my name, going down on the end, like I was silly. The snuggling and laying if your head my lap. Your bad dancing. Your worse singing. The way you tap the steering wheel like crazy to music and the way you bounce on the balls of your feet. Your long eyelashes and your bad teeth. The way you took care of me when I was sick.

IF I could let go a bit of the YOU part of us, I still miss the us. I still just can't be back to normal, normal doesn't exist anymore. I have to get a new one.

Really it's like this:

Two girls wake up one day some place bright and cold and unfamiliar, sore and bandaged and someone, with very little bedside manner, tells them they have lost a leg. It's gone. They weep, they mourn, the fear for the life they have to lead now, minus a leg. All off balance and disabled.

The girls, for one brief second take solace in knowing each other's exact loss.

They go to bed.

One wakes up, and the girl beside her is gone. She is the only patient in the room and...she has a leg. Her leg. Miraculously! Oh joy! Oh crappy metaphor! Her leg is back. They tell her it is weak and withered but, one day will be back to full strength. It may take time.

Or, in this non-metaphorical case, about 3 days. And look! Walking! Jumping! Running!

She and her leg live happily ever after. She never thinks about that other girl again.

That other girl never gets that leg back. She looks around and wheels from place to place, painfully aware of how unlike her life her new life is. People tell her, hey, a blind man climbed a mountain, this life doesn;t mean LESS just because its different.

But, for now, her stump itching and her ghost limb aching, she can only see just how less it is.

The people around me, trying to help me, trying to love me past this huge hole tell me to look at it less like a leg. It was more like a tumor. I got it removed and can grow healthy now.

But that is all a difference of perspective here. Some people love a girl with a beauty mark, others cut it out like cancer.

Me, I just wish I had my other leg to lean on.