You wore a white button down and a purple v-neck sweater and a black-and-white checked bowtie that didn’t really fit the style of the sweater and made the space between your neck and the tip of the v where your white shirt was showing look much longer than it probably was.

You sat at the other end of the table and I was too worried about staring at you for too long to make conversation with the other guests and I put on a smile but the calculations in my head were churning and I’m not sure I was even really there.

She was wearing a slouchy beanie like the ones in my mother’s knitting magazines. It was gold and glittery and it hung from the back of her hair as she turned her face toward you and I watched you laugh at her jokes. And I wondered if you were really there.

And we stood in your kitchen as you filled your mason jar with wine and neither of us was really asking about the other one but we kept saying words and making sentences and I wonder why I didn’t ask more and why I kept talking about my god damned self about my god damned self and why didn’t I ask you what instrument you played or where you were going over the summer or anything anything beyond myself and I was trapped by your gaze and I forgot everything that I knew and sentences were like dungeons and I want to be silent with you.

Do you, too, get lost in the lines?

#prose #love #romance #streamofconsciousness

I knew you were temporary. I knew our love was tethered to the summer wind, bound to be lost to the ocean and an ever growing number of days, years. With each kiss, I counted the minutes left, trying to grasp on to the last moments of your subtle accent, the last seconds of your smile.

I begged myself not to love you. Tried to will the veins of my heart to resist the very feeling they had been built for. I knew it would only make the inevitable harder. What if it didn’t have to be temporary? But I was too afraid to tell you I would relocate my future just to be able to run my fingers through your hair again.

I wrote down every conversation. Every moment. I wrote how your glasses rested on the curve of your nose, how your hand danced on my neck when we kissed, how you kept two earrings pinned to the inside of your hat, for just in case. I didn't want to miss any detail. I didn't want to forget anything. As if maybe, when our souls had drifted an ocean apart, I could still have you, if only in my memory.

I would never tell you that I loved you–that I still loved you.

As summer subsided to snow, I spent my nights fighting off the memory of your warm breath on my neck, begging my brain to come up with anything, anything else to fall asleep to. Some nights I would indulge my delusion, let myself draft how we would meet again in some future I wanted desperately to believe in. On the worst nights, when the silence of suburbia gave my thoughts the microphone I tried so hard to silence, I would replay the three seconds you'd sent me once upon what now seemed like a dream. "Ehm, goodnight, sleep tight," it would sing through my phone speaker.

Your eyes faded from my memory and I tried to let myself lose you. I tried to relinquish the fantasies of some far off day when you would gently tuck my curls behind my ears again, wish me goodnight in your accented English. I tried my hardest to stop looking for you in every brunette I saw on the streets. I tried, oh God I tried, to admit that it was only temporary.

--

It was a warm April evening when I saw you again. It is over, I wrote on a napkin as I prepared myself with a cappuccino. It is over, I repeated as I snaked through the foreign streets to your apartment. It is over, I tried to will my heart to, finally, close.

But standing there, in an open flannel, I couldn't help but hope for some fantastical forever.

And like the dream I had drafted so many times, your heart was still open, too.

The ocean cannot take you away from me.

I suppose its a nice wall hanging. Not the most beautiful of decorations, although maybe it would be more interesting if I could read latin. Certainly not worth the many thousands of dollars I payed for it, but there it hangs.

Of course, I could have hung a nice watercolor of flowers in the office instead, or a portrait of my family, a photograph of a mountain I'd visited many years ago. Instead, there hangs the latin block letters, my neatly printed in the middle.

I remember just a few years back, a late winter night in the library, thinking this piece of cardstock would change everything. The most important document I would ever get my hands on. But there it sits. Worthless. Useless. Possibly the most useless piece of paper I have ever owned. My liberal arts degree.