🫶🏼

The past

You were my favorite universe. I don’t know what happened. Untethered and roaming the edge of you. Tied only in my mind to the mission I had agreed to, when you taught me you, when I found myself in awe for the first time.

If I had more to give, I would, but you don’t ask for it. So I bury myself in blankets and read and write to feel something clean and sensical after hours of disconsolate dreaming. What else can I do?

My body wants to haunt a memory. Or is it the other way around. My body tries to relive times when the possibility of a touch was still alive. I know what longing was. Thank God it’s a was, for it nearly ate me, whole and bloody. Only hate could break the cord, you see. So I did what I must to get free.

Does it break my own heart to know how devoted you could have made me? How much admiration I had for every little thing? How beautiful you were to me, how lightning lit me up when you, however briefly, wanted me.

God, what would I give to love that way again? To believe it was anything other than a trick, a game of some old Greek myth, toying with the hero, self aggrandizing again.

But here it is. A washed up unrequited. And here it remains: a thing that gave me poetry. At least I’ll always have that. Maybe more—

The present

At least I’ll always have me.

I forgive you, and I forgive me too. We were just kids, doing what children do. And maybe the world is better for it. Because maybe we both became better, in the end. Thank you.

I wish you nothing but the best, and that all your dreams come true. Even if only it is the act of still dreaming that makes them so. What a gift it is: to experience. What a gift it is to feel, and dream, and suffer, and bloom.