Making friends with Miss Havisham // Gemma Abbott
Laid low by my former love
We promised ‘til death and
Very nearly etched it into our beings
But his well ran dry early
Perhaps being as
The beginning of this end has
Felt like a hundred excruciating deaths
He is no oath breaker after all
And this impostor of a man
Who wears my husband’s skin
Now holds another in those “other” arms
While the wife in me
Lays starved to death in the corner
Photograph by Christina Rivers
A hollow vessel I must now give up
Miss Havisham raises a dusty glass
And we sit there together
This corpse bride and I
In the blazing remains of what we once
Might have called home.
I lost him some time around Lisbon, if not before. He reckons later but I can see he is still deceiving himself in many ways. He tells me off for trying to see into his soul but I am not any more. I don’t like what it is that I find there, this impostor in the shape of my husband.
The impostor in his arms already.
I can only stare at him with wide sad eyes, like looking at a photograph on the front of a funeral programme. I am excruciatingly aware of what he has cast aside.
Photograph by Polly Alexandra
And he has killed twice this year. He has killed the man that was my husband inside of him, a sudden and selfish death. He has also killed the wife in me, without my consent and much to my anguish. I loved being a wife. I loved being his wife. The space on my finger where the ring should still sit feels numb, pining for that little golden symbol that once made it shine like a star.
Written by Gemma Abbott