I can still remember your hand over your heart as you paused at the jagged shoreline, the way you stood so straight, unafraid -- and I’ve always tried to make myself smaller. When you inhaled it was like a sound only I could hear. At night I listened to you pace outside of my bedroom, treading paths on the dusky carpet, and I’d lay and count the ways we were the same. I’d wake before dawn and look in on you; in sleep your vivid face would be shuttered closed, and each time it was like a wave breaking, the howling sea just before it returned to itself once more. Knowing you felt like coming home.
Love diminishes us. I was so small in your shadow. I’ve never been good at adoring anyone in halves; even now I feel the burst of my heart against the cage of my ribs, that last rush of beauty and hope. I’m afraid that this will rise in me again; I can’t afford to love anyone the way I loved you.
Amazing how stubborn we are: we stumble into fondness, fall, rise, and stumble again. I don’t want to miss you before you were ever here. That’s life, though, isn’t it? A girl standing in knee-high dying grass in the blaze of autumn, the golden afternoon light in a summer kitchen, little northern towns whose borders I wish I could have walked with you. Every mark on the map is a memory. I can imagine you tracing the lines of your own cheekbone like you always did, as if to make sure that you were still there. I could have told you. I could have told you that you existed because to me you were the only thing that did.
Every story I have ever told ends and begins identically: someone reaching for something in the dark. The beautiful alienation of loneliness. In the cold predawn silence we’re all the same and that’s how I remember you. Alone. I would have carved a home out of myself, snapped my ribs and hollowed my lungs, walked the antler-bones of my hips with my fingers. I’d have given you everything, and in a way I think I did.
I haven't seen a familiar sight since you left me. The walls of my city look foreign. Detroit is a wasteland and it’s wasting me away. I want room in my heart to see someone the way I saw you, and maybe that’s what I have. Or maybe it’s the space you left behind.