It's been a year since I last saw you. A year since we last spoke and hugged, and walked away from each other. A year since we both turned around at the same time. It's been a year since I last heard your voice, smelled you, felt the weight of your touch, it’s been a year since we last laughed together. These soft glowing embers have the ambition of a memory and I let them warm my face. I don’t want to leave here.
It’s been a year and I wake up, still loving you. When I leave my house, I hold my heart in my hands and my breath in my throat, feeling your presence near me in the outside world. I picture what bumping into you would be like, think about what I would say and my eyesight goes blurry. I wonder what you will wear and if you'll have your arm around a new girl. I imagine a song will play in the background. From where exactly, I don’t know. Maybe some guy with a guitar will appear, like it happens in Gilmore girls.
How are you, we would say, yeah good, good, and you would laugh your awkward laugh when you don't know what to say and I would smile with my eyes, the ones you used to love, because I would be too emotional to say something smart, no matter how much I have practised it in my head. It’s good seeing you, you too, we should get coffee, one of us would say, yes let's. Yeah. Ok, gotta go, take care, you too, bye. We would hug, maybe a second longer than people who haven’t loved each other before would do, fully knowing neither one of us will arrange that coffee because you didn't want to stay friends, you wanted to stay ‘friendly’, but I don’t know what that is nor how to do that and I am trying to accept it.
The formality of two non-friends-past lovers: It rips through me like a sad earthquake. I don’t believe in god and I still pray I never run into you like that; I couldn’t bear it: the familiarity that’s useless now. The familiarity that will become less relevant and true - because we are both changing. The cutting truth that we crossed paths for a moment - and now are going to have whole lives without each other.
It’s been a year since I last saw you, but it’s only been a week since I cried again thinking of you. Peace is slowly nestling in my heart but I still feel tender when I use your name in the past tense. And when I think of us, I feel a dull burn inside, like someone is grating my organs.
Right person, wrong time - they say that's not true. They say that when it’s the right person, the time will be right too. Just another attempt at making complex humanity simple. I wish reality was as simple as an Instagram quote. I wish reality was making choices based on what you know a year later, not what you know in the moment. I wish reality didn’t sting with the unbelievable sharpness of going from strangers to lovers and strangers again.
All it takes is a year.
I felt every word of this, despite not being in this situation right now, you gently pull on individual memories and collective experiences so beautifully. Xx
I wonder if it really is as simple as those quotes? Sometimes I feel if we keep waiting for those right moments, like a cosmic sign, we’ll miss so much of life and waste the time we have. I don’t know.