The Sinking Feeling When You Know It Ends

I knew it was over before anyone said it out loud. The sirens wailed, but no one ran. Gunshots in broad daylight. Between us, a body bleeds.

When it happened, it felt like slow-motion agony. The pistol went off, the sound ringing in my ears. Every dime we ever spent on love hit the pavement, rolling away like scattered pearls. People screamed, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t rise above my biggest fear.

They ask what happened. I don’t answer. I just look at your hands, still wet with blood, your breath, still steady. You don’t tremble. You don’t flinch. You just stand there like a man who’s done this before. Both hands on the smoking gun.

I tried to save it. Pressed my hands against its chest, counted, begged, whispered prayers between desperate compressions. I swore I felt something—a gasp, a twitch, a sign that I wasn’t too late. So I kept going. Past exhaustion. Past reason. Past the moment you had already given up. You just stood there, watching, like someone who slows down to sightsee a car crash, curious but unaffected.

They bag the evidence: unkept promises, fractured trust, the blade of your indecision.

I tell them it wasn’t sudden. There were signs. Wounds that never really closed, words left unsaid, nights spent in silence. That you took several walks with your hands on the gun long before you ever pulled the trigger. But they don’t need to fact-check. Your prints are everywhere.

In my mind, the jury assembles. They weigh the facts, replay the fights, trace the fingerprints of neglect. They deliberate in silence. It doesn’t take long. You were caught red-handed. You just stand there, blank-faced, like the body at our feet is a stranger. Like you never knew its face.

Maybe you didn’t notice it was dying. Maybe you did and just stared silently as it gasped for breath, as it withered in my hands, as I begged you to help me save it. You must have known. You must have seen it growing pale, felt its pulse fading between us. But still, you never asked what was wrong. Never spoke the words that might have stopped the bleeding. You watch them zip the body up as if it was always meant to go.

I am the only one who mourns. The only one who still tastes blood when I say I was someone’s “love of my life”. I am the only one who still hears its death rattle breathing. Over and over. You wipe your hands clean, step over the wreckage, and walk away. No confession. No remorse. Not even a backward glance.

I stay behind, kneeling at the scene, palms pressed to the cold pavement, searching for something to hold onto. They say time erases the bloodstains, that one day the nightmare will stop waking me up in the middle of the night and that I’ll forget the weight of its last breath in my arms. That the sirens will quiet, the street will empty, and I will get over it.

But I don’t believe.

I still wake up in the same dream to the echo of footsteps that never arrive. I still check my hands for blood, even when they come up clean. I still dream of a trial where you finally admit I killed it. I killed us.

But there is no trial. No sentence. No justice. Just me, standing at the scene of the crime, watching you disappear, while the body turns to dust beneath me.

February, 2025

Adriana