I’m Packing Up My Shadows & Setting Fire To Sinking Ships.

I think of you sometimes, on nights like this, when I’m alone with my memories; my ache, my time, my head filled with music we used to make through our words. I think of concrete our shoes have conquered during conversations started with “hey.” I look at those parts now, at how hollow I feel without them, and I run inside, like a river of sorrow at their loss. Ghosts walk with me, keep others at bay, and I let them recall all those things I don’t dare in the dark when I’m by myself.

“I’ve seen love, and I’ve followed the speed of starlight.”

We’re on the beach, with coffee, staring at the ocean, talking about the way and time. Your fingers are thick around the cup, there’s sand on your eyebrow, and the wind makes you squint one side of your face against its force. A cage opens inside of me, and everything winged in it, flies out, and I wonder that you can’t see it in me when I’m around you. This makes me smile, makes me nervous, makes me alive. And in our flight we come and we go, but always alone.

I watch you when you aren’t looking; I take in every line of you and hide it away deep inside myself, because somehow I know, at some point, I won’t be able to trace those lines with any part of myself. Every interaction I ever had I always treated as my last, because a part of me knew it might very well be, our territories invading the psychological, discomfort the end and ever after.

“I felt you so much today.”

It’s been almost a year and I’m still completely devastated. The removal of you from my life has left me barren inside; barren and empty the way nuclear explosions leave their testing sites. Nothing grows here anymore, I’ve tried; tried and failed to harvest something resembling emotion. Tried to form meaningful connections, watched them mutate, starve in the radiated emotional dark, and die.

I’m still dealing with loss, with pain, with “why.” I see pieces of you in everything I do; slivers of the psychological surfacing to remind me that the past is never far enough to admit to things like “emotional progress.” Words like “fine,” good,” and “o.k.” spill meaninglessly from me to make the worry worn in others disappear if only for a spell. Everyday I engage automatic in the hopes that one day, I’ll wake up and realize “I’m worth it,” even though you never saw in me the things I valued so much to show only you.

“Time is my vessel, and learning to love might be my way back to sea.”

In a year I’ve run miles to escape your ghost; I’ve lifted pain, to replace the pain I feel at your loss. I’ve driven day and night to escape the familiar, and you’re there at every intersection in my mind; it’s a Friday, early evening, the Beetle’s running, it’s sunny and fall is in the air.

You were like the death of me, and I am no longer here.