my last words

I miss you. I might always miss you. I learned another lesson from loving you, one that is finally not bitter. It’s funny… you’d think love is a natural thing. Maybe the word explains too much with too little, and we are left sorting all the feelings. Love isn’t sweet, like the movies say.

It’s peaceful, to finally feel his way. It never feels final, even when things are obviously over. Maybe none of this is ever final. It’s freeing not to always feel like I’m dangling from a feeling. I needed to be ignored to find that. I used to think that was an irredeemable quality, a despicable habit, to leave someone in the uncertainty. That’s an opportunity, too, to be leant into. I thought I was good at loneliness, I sure practice it a lot. Maybe I’ll always need that reminder. We all have our deficiencies. Love inflames them, makes them more obvious. A flame test. Life is too nuanced to condemn comprehensively.

It’s the small things, they say. They sure do say a lot, too much to find without experience. I always wanted my own special lens, my own words for the same phenomena: the human condition. But it’s nice to know the words are all the same, different access points for all the nuanced perspectives.

To see now, the obsession, its roots, and how I latch to those opportunities. How quickly they fade, how long I spend between. I guess we all feel alone too long.

I lump the coincidence of infatuation into a validation of my feelings. I beg the world for signs, so I don’t have to transmogrify a lumpy gut. But they can be separate things: signals and impulses. We can feel them without needing the fantasy to materialize. It’s fun to have my imagination melt into reality. It’s not always right, or good, beneficial, rewarding. Some dreams, must just be dreams.

I have faith today. I feel at home. Everywhere. Even without another body to share it with. You may not know it, but you’re here too. Maybe that’s how I know it’s home.

home is smiling when you miss someone, crying when you forget the scenery is repeated.

home is familiar, but new every day. it is forgetting you will be leaving too soon, no matter how long you were allowed safe passage. you know it will be gone, as all homes are, someday. you know it, but the safety makes you forget. you have this moment. some take a lifetime to create it. you have it now. tomorrow is for grieving the past.

maybe someone will join your fight when the settlers come. but you may become one, too. if they win. keep your principles true.

home may find you in a place you have already seen, in a place completely new, in a place that is changing at the pace which brought you there.

My only regret is placing my hope in you, making you a representative of how I feel, placing the responsibility in your actions, and feeling hurt as things played out. Connection, empathy, even love; they can be manipulative, selfish, corrupt.

We carry that destructive power, convinced and reassured of our benevolence. And it must be taken from us to show the hidden motive. We hide it from ourselves, we hide it to each other in platitudes. We hide, we hide, until we are taken.

I drafted letters with conviction, that they could be a form of closure. Intent on sending them. That intent craves for a response. It’s malignant, growing in the dark.

I know I haven't fully said goodbye. I have come to the realization that I never really say goodbye, that a teardrop fell into my next self and now I see a piece of you everywhere, and always will.

One year, one more, until there are decades of separation.

There’s no distance great enough to run from you. Maybe I’m running from the reminder that I’ll never be the man I was.

Where did you go. I never gave up.

yet.

I have to every time I’m reminded of you.

We weren’t anything, maybe that’s what makes me crazy, good evidence in a story, to condemn my actions.

The purity of not having each other still gives me hope. You’ve been my hope.

That I’m possible.

again.

And I feel I need to send a final letter, put a physical end to this.

I hold to the inspiration you are to me.

the disease.

Will you be my imagination and my life?

I thought you were magic, that we could be seeing ourselves at the same time, finally—in a body, in a mind—we didn’t hate. It wasn’t magic. It wasn’t impossible. It wasn’t an event that could never happen again.

This was life.

And we got to see it.

Together.

I’ll see you in the next.