Arcadia

38

If they tell you I never happened, believe them. It's hard to tell, but atoms never really touch.

.

And, years later, I'll celebrate a love trapped in screenshots. I'll celebrate a love I tasted, it tasted of mint cigarettes, of secret letters and purple paint, of honey and lemongrass. I tasted a soul, so different, yet so like mine. You were fire, and I was only the dry paper that burnt, like pleasure. Matches burn out faster than melodies, they aren't meant to be everlasting.

I once wrote of a girl with fire in her soul, though she wasn't anything like you. But she told me how fire is selfless, how it burns itself out to light others up. I loved her. I still do, even though we long burned out. I am faithful to all my lovers, I close my eyes and remember them all of late nights, between light and shadow, just before sleep hits. He laughs at my face when I say that. He has seen the sun. He says it's melancholy, but I think I crave the pain. Something to feel human again.

We built our paper houses in the air, in melancholy and comfortable silences, and you left me in the ashes of this place that we called our home. We chased our ghosts, in matching steps. We breathed in harmony, in the salty air of this city smelling of heartache and sin. You were the melody, and I'm only the cage the bird's song laments of.

He told me of a warm place with no memory. Under the oak tree I see in my dreams sometimes, locked in a little red tin box with your name on it, are my sins, buried and forgotten. I hope you'll find them sometime.

Do you feel the wind?