RAW

You held my waist once. In my dream. Or maybe that’s not where this starts.

I was trying to write about the weather earlier. About how the heat has settled over everything lately, how even the evenings feel exhausted, but somehow I ended up here again.

I keep thinking about that room. The one in the dream. Not even the room, really. Just your hand. It’s strange what survives in my mind sometimes.

You’d think it would be the important things.

The conversations, the promises people make when they’re tired enough to tell the truth.

Instead it’s a square inch of illusion.

Your hand at my waist and the terrible realization that I’d spend days carrying it around like a scar, like a bruise like it was real.

I haven’t slept properly since we talked last week. Or maybe I’ve slept too much.

I fell asleep this afternoon with the television on and woke up convinced it was morning. For a second I forgot you were gone.

I don’t know which version is worse. The remembering or the forgetting.

You said I love you once and afterward everything felt slightly rearranged. I blacked out after that. Not literally. Although maybe a little literally.

I just mean I haven’t entirely located myself since. You. You, you, you.

It’s embarrassing how often a person can fit into a day. I hear your name nowhere and everywhere.

A sermon. A seizure. A song stuck beneath the skin.

I was making coffee yesterday and suddenly remembered the way you touch your hair.

What a ridiculous thing to miss. And somehow that hurt more.

I think that’s what nobody tells you. That longing becomes incredibly specific after a while. It stops wanting the person and starts wanting the exact angle of their shoulders.

The way they clear their throat before speaking. The pause before they laugh. The silence after.

Sometimes I think if I could climb inside your thoughts for an afternoon I’d finally be free of you. Then I think that’s probably a lie. I don’t even want your thoughts.

I want to know whether I still appear in them.

Which is different. Or maybe it isn’t.

I don’t know.

I’ve built little shrines out of screenshots I should’ve deleted months ago.

The dreams of your hand reaching for mine. The way you say my name. The way you look down when you walk. The way I can tell you’re smiling when we’re on call.

I talk about you a lot. Not out loud, mostly. The walls don’t answer and I suppose that’s for the best.

Still, sometimes the silence feels so empty I feel responsible for filling it. So I tell the air about you. I tell it things it already knows.

I tell it how beautiful your veins looked beneath your skin. I tell it how unfair it was that you existed exactly the way you did. I tell it how much I zoomed into your pictures to feel your presence. I tell it because the silence is unbearable otherwise.

Lately I’ve been reading old messages. Not for meaning. The meaning is obvious. For evidence. For proof that there was a version of the world where I could reach you and you’d reach back.

I count the minutes between memories. I count the days since I heard your voice. I count and count and count.

As if eventually the numbers will become something useful. As if math has ever been able to explain devotion. As if God hasn’t always hidden inside repetition.