i'm on a walk on a monday and I've just seen someone who looks like you. he rode a skateboard and walked a german shepherd, his skin was tan and his hair was brown and fluffed.
i met his eyes,
it didn't jolt me like i thought it would. i watched him as he passed, his energy was nervous. it wasn't you, unless i've just forgotten your face. but i was mostly unshaken.
still, for a minute i wished he'd turn around. i wanted him to stop so i could find out where he's from, if he'd been here for a while and maybe picture, if he'd been there all along, that it had been him all this time instead of you. in some other version of my life where he was a better man than you had been and none of us knew the difference. he looked enough like you. it wouldn't be hard to believe.
but he was never going to turn around, his energy was too nervous, and i kept walking, looking behind me at him moving away.
now i'm sitting on a bench near where you and i once climbed a roof, looking up and counting church bells as clouds move behind the tower;
in what i like to call anguish but is really more annoyance, at the power you still hold over me. or rather the force. i keep the power, i cut you out of me, yet there is a force that moves my hands to almost put you back.
i still have dreams, twice a week, sometimes more, where you're indifferent to me. you won't look at me, you walk by or you say we're better off apart and i come chasing after you, clutching your arms and even begging. i am never a beggar. not once in my waking days, and yet.
but when i wake up i am grateful to know that you're far away. i continue to choose the path where i never speak to you again if i can help it,
and may i hold true to that.
i'm getting tired of all my days being taken by you. my hometown ringing as the place you used to walk, instead of being something that's mine. i lived here first, before i ever knew of you. i live here. mine.
but you take it all up, in just the way you planned. taking all of my most important things. fighting on my 18th birthday, announcing your service at my graduation. leaving from my home town. i want my things back- all of them, all my places, my stories, my love, and my town. my life, and my memories. my mind and my dreams.
i want it all back, and you can have none of it. you can keep your guilt and your regret. you can keep your cruelty and find a new lover who will never know the kind of treachery you left behind.
i'll sit here, afraid of every man i see. not worried that it's you, you only ever show in dreams, or in my every waking minute.
you're a bastard and a thief. and i want it all back, i wasn't old enough to give it in the first place.
surely there's some justice to be had for that.
