dreamland

eighteen

Time past, time present, time future; why does it all feel the same now?

I'm still angry, at the universe, at you, at myself.

But isn't this all the same?

Year in and year out I still see the same deciduous tree turn white in the spring and turn lifeless in the winter.
And I find myself still waving to the same familiar faces and sleeping in the same positions before slipping away into a place I have always known as dreamland. It all is so constant and even now my emotions are added to list of constant variables in this life of mine.
Your face has come back and I see it on my skin like a tattoo in white ink.
It's just like it was months ago.
I am still thinking of you.
I am still wearing the gold pendant on my neck and my hair still falls just centimeters past my shoulders.
So maybe time does not exist.
No, I don't think that it does.
I know that you exist and that I exist.

But the heaviness weighs on me that she exists too and she existed before me.

She was the first to fall in love with the way you smiled after you said something that I hated to admit was awfully funny.
She noticed, way before I did, that you clench your jaw and furrow your brows when you are trying to control yourself.
She saw how gentle you were when speaking about things that really mattered to you.
She kissed the soft skin that covered your ribs before I had.
She did.
And now I am once again at the mirror comparing myself to her.
Her black hair the color of the feathers of a crow's wings.
Her big and bold eyes that I am sure you fell in love with when you saw them.
Her freckled face and arms that I can imagine you've said are the kisses from angels as you caressed her in warm fine morning.
Her red fingernails running through your hair and down your arms and down your back.
I can only imagine how many times you looked over at me and compared my features to hers or vice versa.
You've had to have done so at least once or twice.

Maybe you couldn't leave her because she was prettier than I was.
Or maybe you couldn't leave me because she wasn't as soft as I was.
I don't know.
I really try and figure what went on through your mind for that elongated period of time. Seems like I will never know.
I think I would fall apart if I asked you and you actually told me the truth stripped of deceit and dishonesty.

I sit in my car now and look up at the moon and stars wishing this would have never ever happened.
It just hurts so much to think of.
It hurts and hurts and burns and it itches and it's left me with scabs I still pick at.

My best friend has tried to reach out to me, but god, I don't even want to talk about it.
When I found out about it, with my own two eyes, I remember I was so embarrassed.
I felt so stupid and humiliated that someone could have ever made me the victim of this brutal joke I'd called love for so long.
To even have told her felt like presenting a project with shaky hands at the front of your whole class.
It was humiliating and I kept wishing I would drown or have a heart attack on the drive over to her house.

You didn't come by after that day and I thought maybe you'd given up or maybe you were now at her house, begging her to take you back.
I got angry again so I just told myself to stop thinking about it.

Instead I focused on the fact that school was starting up again and soon I would wake up ‪at 10 AM‬ to hear a boring lecture in a room filled with 90 other students.

I could only dream of what awaited me after I finished school.
The places I would perhaps be so lucky to see.
I wanted out of this town for as long as I could recall because it really does make it seem like time does not move onward.
It makes you feel like you are forever in this endless blip.
I told you I wanted out, as I highlighted and annotated the 300 page textbook in my lap one lazy afternoon.
You had dropped out of high school; and when you had, everyone knew, because regardless of what people say, there are faces you do remember.
Yours is one of those faces.
Even when you were working at the grocery store and smoking a cigarette and breaking into someone's pool, everyone couldn't stop being so engrossed in what is was you were doing.
I hear a story about you every now and then and it's no wonder people still can't stop talking about you. As I said, boys praised you for what you had done.

You would say to me, see, you don't need college to be someone special.
You didn't but I did.
I wanted to see a different view outside my window and taste the apples that grow south of the equator.
You could never understand.

I told you that you were satisfied with just about anything, but I think I take my words back.

You were a conformist in every other aspect except in the one it had really mattered.

You just had to have two pairs of eyes looking at you dubiously and two pairs of hands on your shoulder blades and arms.
You just had to because you had gotten tired of saying, it's okay, I don't need more.

Until you needed more, until you loved the lust in both our pairs of eyes for you.