collection

Things to collect:

I don’t think people really understand the power of their words. Some things can be said so nonchalantly, such as:

please stay, cause you’re the only other person in this city I can relate to.

Maybe that’s just a casual statement, but to me it’s a declaration of trust.

past tense

I’ve avoided looking around too much, I don’t really want to be curious. Don’t want to let my thoughts wander, don’t want to know too much about who you were.

I walk around your space and touch your things. I let my hands run over the sofa cover, the ones you changed when she left. I look at decorative items you’ve received from someone or another.

I let the water run for a while to get warm, soak the cloth, wipe down the oven and countertop. Open the fridge. I stare at the bottle of fish sauce, wondering if you’re adult enough to use it with purpose. Unlike me.

Your plants are all healthy, and I feel like that speaks volumes about you. And me.

I pick up the collection of water glasses and make your bed the way you usually do it.

I stop by your bookshelf, let my body collapse into the chair and run my fingers across the spines of your notebooks. I consider. Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t. But it’s not about us. I don’t want to take it with me.

The air outside is fresh and new, and I breathe it in with greed.

afraid

“I’m afraid it’s too late”, she says. I know it is. I just don’t want to know. I want to keep dreaming up the stories of how things would be, how I’d be a better person somehow, like how I wouldn’t be stuck being me. Somehow I’d be who I wanted to be, and you’d be who you always dreamed you’d be too.

Nothing would be painful, because after all it was meant to be. Sunday would be our days to discover, and we’d share the things we’d wondered about all week under the dim lighting in our living room sitting close together under a blanket. I’d ask if you wanted to share a bottle of wine with me, and then we would laugh at our own theories on life because we know nothing. But at least we would laugh.

difference

It would feel like any other day.
The day you felt the difference.

And it became so scary saying it out loud.
Like it is somehow more real if you do. And you come to realize it’s true.

It’s like all of our secrets come tumbling out of a jacket pocket.
You would look at me, and your face would tell me you knew what it felt like to be me.
Because we felt the same.

with you

“What if I hadn’t been that far away?”

You looked at me the way people look at other people when they're asking questions they know the answer to.
I didn't have one though, so I smiled and pretended to know what the answer was and that I knew that you knew too.

Maybe sometimes we're never really that close to each other at all. There always seems to be at least one universe between us, even though our hands are touching and our feet might be touching too.
And sometimes when I look at you, I don't know who you are.
Admittedly, sometimes I look at myself, and I don't know who I am either.

Then again. When I look at you, I know exactly who I am, and who I've been.
And who I want to be.
And you make me feel like I'm home, wherever you and I might be.