I think I mistook you for someone else. I wish I could explain this - but I can’t - how everyone I meet is a reflection of someone who came before. And I wish I could tell you - but I can’t - how every silence between us is a language that I can’t speak, the words slipping away unmoored into the dark.
There’s an art to this. Everything that I’ve done to you was once done to me. And sometimes I wonder if in another life I saw you, if we passed one another on the street, if the distance between us hurt more than the impact. I can look back, now, and see patterns emerge: I’m not as young as I was before. I don’t know how you see me because I still don’t know how to see myself. I can envision the bitten fingernails, the knotted scar on my hip and the uneven bow of my mouth, but somehow even this fades when I consider the features in the mirror. It’s someone else’s face, reflected differently in each span of light, pale-boned with eyes impossibly dark. My features are amorphous and I am a stranger and I can’t tell you of all the times I’ve loved strangers too.
I’ve heard that this sort of thing is God’s way of remaining anonymous. The effortless knife and lazy blade, the incision between two people, the widening of water. There was his stained t-shirt and there was the flat expanse of his chest and how he used to laugh like the devil, and smile like him, too. His face wasn’t like mine. It was fixed, unsubtle, the haze of his green eyes forest-dark, how he used to tease me and tell me that my worries were going to fall apart just as surely as anything else. He told me that what I felt was a passing mistake, that I was someone he’d stumbled over and that I needed to stop bowing my head towards him like a cat in want of adoration, that these sorts of things only ended in one way. But what does that even mean - an ending?
I remade myself in his image. The needless quirks, how he smoked only Reds, how he was somehow filled with a mad hope for the world. Loving him was like living inside of a stranger’s skin. Light looked different. Shadows receded. And somewhere in between adoring him and abandoning him there was that moment, coming to a palpitating point and then vanishing completely - the moment where I realized I’d become someone else.
Now even shadows have a depth to them, a deeper darker black; when I stand in your silhouette I feel transformed. There’s a word for this in some other language, I’m sure, but not in my own: the knowledge that you have been turned inside out by someone else. You can leave a person but they never leave you. They come back, always, in bad dreams and street names, old houses and older roads; just the other week I walked the path we wound together years ago. Sometimes I think I almost catch a trace of you - dark curl of hair or too-long lashes - but they’re gone before I can open my hand to catch them. You aren’t returning, to me or to this place, and no presence is ever felt so strongly as a lack.