Do you still read these posts? Keeping track of a life lived on display? There are nights when I lay staring up at the darkened ceiling, wondering if some part of you still think about me like I do you. There are moments in my life, stories that unravel with the passage of time, and I find myself wishing there was some way to let you know.
Temperatures reached freezing this morning. I remembered our discussion about weather. How you preferred the warmth of the sun, while I longed for the colder nights where we could lay bundled beneath a mountain of blankets, sucking each other’s breath for added warmth.
Do you still think of the poem I wrote for you? My last will and testament, a love letter to a romance born from adultery? Do you linger in the comment panel, backspacing apologies or words unspoken?
You warned me. Of how you’d hurt me. Of how I wore my heart on my sleeve, quick-willed to give it away to anyone who offered me an ounce, a fleeting act of kindness. “You act too quickly, fast to make plans of a future we both know we can never have.”
Thought of us on bus rides, on long road trips. In a motorcade. We sell each other short, and made hasty bets. I kissed you in the parking lot of a Dairy Queen, in a Whataburger. I confuse the histories.
We spoke of our children playing in gardens, in parks. A parlor trick, another round of hide-and-go-seek. You asked me for the strength you could not muster. You asked me to lay down the arms and armor, to lower the gates, tear down the walls erected.
We were golden lips, apple cores, and fuzzy socks. Burned out heaters and crashed cars. Locked doors and open windows. Small fires and tsunamis on the horizons. Brick homes with brittle foundations. The avalanche, the landslide. The forest fire, the crackling of lightning. Pushed up daisies in the cemetery plot. Forget-me-nots and haven’t-beens. We glided like paper planes moments before the tornado. The suck. The solution.
Do you still lay awake and think of me like I do you? Do you hear my voice in acts of kindness like I heard yours through the violence?
Chapin City Blues 