Wallflower

11.7.19

Are you like me? Do you give too much, too quickly? Do you throw yourself blindly at the world, thinking it will always open its arm up to you?

Do you feel the slow turning beneath your feet, the shifting plates? Do you sense the streams of fissures underneath like unrequited love, desperate for somewhere to go?

Do you feel the wind pulling back and forth, constricting and expanding, a perpetual cycle as vicious as it is tender, like when it hurts you to breathe, but it's the only thing that sustains you.

Are you like me? Do you live with the dial turned up at full volume? Can you taste the salt of the sea when you're miles inland and the ocean feels like a fractured memory?

Are you like me? Are you alive or just pretending?

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It's been a long time ago

and I have long forgot about it

because healing is I needed

but I was driving to buy groceries today

and a song played on the radio

it reminded me of you.

You were the only person I knew

who loved grocery shopping

as much as I do.

I remember there was once

we spent an hour

laying down, decided whether you need to buy foods

or stay at the room with me

and you came with nothing

but a lot of snacks and our favorite mee

and two bottles of water

because we got thirsty

through all the laughter.

The song on the radio finished

but I took out my phone

and I played the song again.

It's been a month since it ended

and you have long moved on

it was suppose to be our day

but today I can't help but wonder

if you were the one that got away.

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Sometimes I go days without saying your name. Days without thinking of you or us or the things we did. Sometimes I go weeks without saying your name. Weeks without dwelling on the past, good or bad. But sometimes I slip up and your name escapes from my mouth the way my heart attempted to escape from my chest the moment our lips first met.

Sometimes when I say your name it's as if it were last February and I was holding your hand for the first time. And sometimes when I say your name it's like you've been lost from me for centuries.