I don’t know you anymore

My heart’s insistence for closure is disgraceful desperation, just a veil for my hunger. The thirst of seeing you, even for a second more, leads me down this path of despair, along the roads you once trod, as though I might find pieces of yourself you forgot to leave behind. It is hope that drags me here, across the pebbles, with dirt beneath my fingers as I dig into the soil where I buried the lost memories of us, back when I tried to forget before I was ready.

I hope to find something—anything—you left behind. Your flesh decaying, as if my tears might ease the rot, soften it, stop it. As if a kiss could wake you, and lay you back in these withered arms.

I knew little of grief before you, she only waved at me by the door. Until that day you left, and she came knocking adamantly with a sour smile, claiming she was a souvenir and the atonement for losing oneself in the chains of devotion. Love, they call it, but weakness, I now know. She walked in that day and never found a way out. She scraped her way to the window, savaged the doors, dug through the walls, but still she lay limply on the floor. She wanted to leave that morning, with the sun’s freckles through the blinds. She preached her ruin, that she had overstayed her welcome—yet I adjured her to stay, in fear that I couldn’t be alone.

Sinking my head underwater, as the ripples carry the essence of what you left. A memory in wisp, like the wind, like you hovering by, a soft whisper of your voice. I plunge my hair into the stream of lies, of someone I knew before. You before me, me before you. And I don’t know what to make of it, who played the fool, or who swindled the wise. I close my eyes only to the lapping memory, a sound of someone I made all up, a caricature to douse my pain. Sculpted through the script you played so well, that I almost fell into my own lie.

A stream of lies, and here I lay—

from your ocean of pride, as more streams you create.

So, like me, they can wash their curls with longing, and the inadequacy of failing to swallow the ocean whole.