It was 3:18 in the morning on a winter Tuesday.
You were nowhere to be seen.
You were nowhere to be seen for a while now. It still hurt me. It still broke me up into pieces until I had become nothing but dust, left to be blown off aimlessly in the wind, unable to be found and put back together. You were probably off living your life with ease; you were living your life without me. You were probably content with that considering you left and you hadn’t the slightest will to call. Or text. Not even pass along a message to a friend to give to me. Nothing. There was not a trace of you for me to remember at the time.
It was 3:19 in the morning on a winter Tuesday and I had ceased to exist.
On a warmer afternoon in October, when the leaves were getting a lot more gold in color, you told me you needed space. With that said the first leaf fell; gold would cease. The leaves would die and become nothing important. They’d become wrinkled and fragile and unable to live for the colder months to coming. I felt like a leaf; falling, crumbling, delicate, unable to live through the seasons to come.
I asked for how long. Your answer was indefinite. I knew that from the moment on, the days would feel a bit colder. The frost would bite me a bit harder. The vapor of my breath would be a bit bolder. The nights would last a little bit longer.
It was 8:29 in the evening on a spring Saturday.
You were nowhere to be seen.
You were nowhere to be seen for too long now. That evening the rain wouldn’t subside. I still thought about you. Ceaselessly. Hopelessly. It’s hard to get over the world. That was you. I never told you that, but I thought it. All the time. Even when you left. Even now. You were my world, you were my world, you were my world, I’d repeat in my head whenever I was alone. Everything about you was perfection, even when you claimed otherwise. It wasn’t that you were close to perfect; it was that you surpassed it. I never told you that, but I thought it. It was a thought that would never leave, even if you did. I still wished you stayed. I still wished for a lot of things. I still wished for you.
For you to be held in my arms,
For you to let me hold your hand,
For you to sing meaningless lyrics with me at the top of our lungs no matter how off-key you were,
For you to let me embrace you and talk to you whenever you were sad, even if you didn’t want to talk to anybody,
For you to go on midnight coffee runs with me, even if you were tired,
For you to dance with me even though we didn’t know what we were doing,
For you to stay,
For you to still love me like I still hopelessly loved you.
I still wished for the memories to be relived. But I realize that history can’t be relived the same. Something is always different. No matter, I wished for it anyway. People would try to convince that I was just in love with the memory of you and just that. They were wrong, I was in love with the memory of you, and you. I just wish I knew how you felt about me so I could finally sleep at night without the thoughts in the dark crevices of my brain resurrecting and haunting me.
A ring.
I didn’t want to talk to anybody. The memories that existed and the ones that I wished existed were overwhelming my mind that I couldn’t talk to anybody. Not tonight. Reluctantly, I picked up my phone.
I froze.
Somehow I prayed that my tired bloodshot eyes were deceiving me; the sight was too overwhelming for me to take in fully. I wished I was delusional and just seeing things due to the lack of sleep
“Hey,” I heard on the other end.
The dark thoughts that wandered in my mind earlier sank back into their abyss, and something new happened.
“Hey,” I said.
“I miss you.”
It was 8:31 in the evening on a spring Saturday and I could breathe again.
