I wrote the most beautiful things when I was in love with you. Existence was a perpetual autumn even in winter, dizzy and windswept, the colors of life somehow louder than sound. Everything a memory waiting to turn to anguish. Everything an echo of something else.
I was only ever a dreamer in those days, and maybe that’s the kindest thing I can say of anyone: that beside the ache of loneliness, the serpentine curl of dread, there was that unmistakable sense of returning somewhere I’d been before yet had never wanted to leave. And maybe, selfishly, that’s why I loved you: because you’d always felt like home.
And I realized that it would always feel like something had been taken from me, every single time. Because I would always be the one left standing, and they would always be the ones to depart; because in the prism of my memories they would remain the way they were as I loved them first. And how to tell anyone that I stumbled into fondness so easily, to please be merciful if they couldn’t be kind, that once I sensed they were alive in the same way I was that they would never die?
Sometimes I feel people’s kindnesses curling under the edges of my vulnerability like fingertips. It makes me wary, and it’s impossible to explain what I’m positive most others wouldn’t understand. And anyhow, I’m half-certain that words would diminish it regardless, that words are for those who don’t know a thing as innately as I do: like how when we describe love, or passion, or fear, we describe everything around it but the emotion itself. Faulkner explained it best: how once you felt it, you wouldn’t need words any longer. You’d know.
Looking up at the starry emptiness felt like an ending and I knew it was. To some any kind of death is a beginning and to others a cessation and to others a rebirth; to me it’s a stillness.
In my head, I did everything right. I was gentler and so were they. I turn my mom’s words over like stones in my mind, trying to make sense of them: “I promise you that there is no such thing as too much kindness.” I try to carry it with me. I try to soften myself against the world and I remember that inescapable feeling when I saw you first in the city, your wind-curled hair and strange dark eyes. I don’t have the words for it, but I don’t need them. I just know.