I wrote you a letter. A vanity full of letters in various stages of handwriting—loopy, spacey, rigid, and packed. Those letters are violent; I raged as I wrote. Writing those two hundred or so words brought on a tropical fever and passion reignited.
So I begged the question—did I care about you? Or did I care about me?
When I lost you, I lost only you. When I lost myself, I lost music. I lost the ability to track rhythm, meter, and rhyme.
We were never bitter. Always passing. Though I was in positions to hold you, I wasn't in a position to guide you.
We heal but we destroy and yet it comforts us.
We had danced most of our time away, cradled in each other, finding solace in stripping layer after layer until we were pink and raw in front of each other. We were not pretty images, we were Sylvia Plath-esque portraits.
After two months of travelling, I returned home. Seldom did I leave my apartment other than to get groceries. My after-state was not caused by you, rather your leaving let me return to where I had always been—in and never out, always floating about. Your dad prescribed me medication as always on a biweekly basis, and I dropped out of college. Like they said, I didn't need it anyway when I was well-versed in the philosophy of loss.
Did you move? I stopped seeing you in places you went. Is it because you wanted to avoid me?
They started cutting down the trees around the road leading to my place. Said they were building a highway. It was stark and soon, I grew used to seeing it.
Did you take your things with you? There were traces of your being other than your scent—that remains clear and unfiltered, drifting like dust in my bedroom. I guess we didn't do that: leave our things at each others' places.
I started eating cake when I got back. Just a few slices from the corner bakery, but I didn't even enjoy it that much. I tasted the flour, egg, and drops of vanilla in it because unlike other things, cake was always sweet. Cake was tangible unlike topics of affection and loss and hurt. My tongue knew the way cake was, and it remained unchanged.
We're all just using metaphors to avoid saying what we can't bear pronouncing, right?
Edit 1. I don't like this part very much. "Sank" is supposed to show my life without you and yet it was the same. It's very hard for me to differentiate but I needed a few chapters before the end. Stories don't usually have the kind of abrupt endings humans are so used to. (I just want to tell a good story.)
