dreamland

fourteen

I thought that I was finally, finally moving past you. It was already a little over a year since I found out and since you left. All the hints of you littered around town and my bedroom had grown more and more insignificant to me.

Until now.

Again, they stood out to me and diverged my mind into thinking of you.

I was running, so early, before the sun even rose, my breath coming out in white puffs when I couldn't stop thinking of you.
Your voice and the color of your eyes and lips was seemingly getting louder than the music in my ears. They were the features of your face I spent hours observing and sighing over in those days when I started to take notice of you.

I turned the corner at the bookstore and off onto the empty road with only trees.
I jumped over a puddle of what used to be snow and would soon be snow again when more snowflakes dropped.

I heard your voice whispering my name until suddenly my own name didn't even sound like a word.

Then it started to sound like his voice, him saying my name, with urgency and wistfulness. It wasn't you anymore, it was him and his esoteric eyes.

A car beeped at me and I quickly stepped out of it's way, still running farther than I usually had ever done.

A harsh gust of wind came over me and loosened more strands of my hair from the braid I'd done hastily.

I zipped up my jacket and picked up my pace, running closer to the town over. The one in where you used to live.

I'd always avoided it after you.
There really was no reason for me to go over there. I still possessed the fear that you would manifest out of the wind and trees and grab me and take me, it was there and it was pulsing on my wrists and behind my eyes.
It would fill the sky above me and I would only think of your eyes coming out the caliginosity. Unknowingly, I would have been back in the past, hurting my own heart and hers as well. Darkness, darkness, a new fear of mine.
A fear of you really.

I ran through the branches and twigs, feeling them snag with my pants.
I ducked under the thick tree trunk and stepped right over the giant, hollow hole I'd twisted my ankle in when I had come here with you.

In the same woods where we had been on that pretty Thursday afternoon that I had imagined us spending at the beach.
But instead you said there was fine and you pinned me up against a tree and kissed me until I stopped being afraid that someone was watching. The fear left as you kissed my stomach and looked up at me after pulling up the skirt of my dress. You were self-willed to say in the least. A self-willed coward, is what you were and well still are.
Although, I'm not sure.
I haven't seen you in so long, so there are no facts, only assumptions based off what I last knew.

If you hadn't left this small, over-populated town, I think I would still be hung up on you.
I think so at least, I can never know for sure. There are too many what-ifs that I have considered and overthought of.
What if you had just told me that she was in your life?
What if I would have payed more attention to all the signs that there were?
What if I would have never met you?
What if I had never even fallen in love with you?

I slowed my pace and looked around at the suburban houses with so many lights strung up on them, they could cause a seizure.
Usually the lawns are green and fertile, but now, there are ornaments upon ornaments hiding the lack of green grass.

I already know that this is the street you used to live on by the sight of the blue Cadillac down the street.

I passed it slowly and I know that in any minute, the man who owns the car will be waking up too. You told me that he was retired and loaded with so much cash, he could buy two more Cadillacs. There was something about him that always drew you close to him. You listened to his stories with your mind like a sponge, ready absorb all his wisdom.
He would speak in a low voice while drinking iced tea, telling you that you should always think ahead. You would nod your head, with this look in your eyes I couldn't decipher, and say, I already do—you really hadn't.
You thought he was the coolest man you'd ever met but I thought he was just lonely. There were no photos hung on the walls and no sign of toys in the garage. It was only him and his precious baby blue Cadillac. You were the closest he would ever come to a son, or grandson and he was the closest you would ever get of a father. It made sense why you clicked with him. But there was still something eerie about him and so when it was combined with you presence, all I wanted was to go home.
He would watch me and then you and then me again and nod his head at you and you'd laugh crazily, like if there were no words that needed to be said, you knew what he was saying.
I didn't like that look.
It was the equivalent of wearing an itchy sweater.

I finally came to your house. It looked like every other one on this street. The only time I'd ever seen your house, I told you that I would never find my way if I got lost here, they were all identical. You said that it wasn't the same, at least not on the inside.
I would always nod my head like I understood but there were just too many innuendos and half responses when you spoke.
I never really had gotten you.
I never got to see your inside or of that white house either.
It almost seems silly to me.
All of it.
The fact that I could have even fallen in love with you when I didn't even know you.
How can you love what you do not know?

I laughed and the sound surprised me so much that I just kept laughing while looking at your house.
My stomach hurt but pain doesn't always have to be the sign of something ugly. That time it was of liberation or closure or an ending. An ending to something that should have never been.

I ran away with my mind finally clear like the sky. I ran so fast that my lungs burned and my thighs ached. I ran away from you and I felt like you could not catch up to me.
No matter how hard you tried or how fast you chased.