Echoes

 

Someone posted this to Facebook.

I started typing, compulsively, without thinking just letting my sadness pour out of my fingers into my phone.

The 15% battery warning flashed and my screen went dim.

Me too phone, me too.

But I kept going.

It sounded a lot like “I want”

Like “I know where the cupboards are, I know where the car is parked, I know he isn’t you” ~Tori Amos

Like this…

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I miss you.
Like the French say “you are missing from me”.
Like I am emptied and hollowed out.
I don’t know if you took something from me, or if when you were here, I finally felt fulfilled and I am readjusting to my half empty/half full state but I don’t know how, even though I must have lived this way for years before you got here.
It’s harder now that I know what it is to be sated in all ways.
Like I still can’t think straight.
I’m Eeyore and there’s a rain cloud over me always.
I miss you like sunshine.
I’m trying to move, to live and breathe but it’s like work now.
Everything is grey and heavy.
I want to hear you laugh that way again when I walked up behind you and touched you.
I want to map your freckles. In the way astronomers do, find the patterns, name them with the names of the old ones and make up myths about them, tell you the stories of your past lives and why your eyes are black moons.
I want to spend an eternity trying to figure out why all of me wants you all of you so much.
I want to pull your atoms apart and see how they match mine. Like puzzle pieces from an old exploded star, I want to put the star back together and have it shine somewhere only we can see because we know where to look.
I want you to call me wifey again. I don’t care about the ring, the diamond can stay coal and I will love it just the same because you gave it to me and it carries with it the idea of warmth and wanting.
I want to fix your couch and make you dinner. Like I promised I would. That is what this is, open ended promises with no way to fill them, no way to fill the minutes in my day, but I am trying.
I want you to see this room and home I made for us.
I want you to come home.
Everything made sense when you were here and now nothing does.
Trees whisper your name. I was supposed to be your flower girl and now I don’t know what I am, so I keep their names safe in my mouth and plant bulbs called hope and allium and narcissus and amaryllis.

I keep sending echoes out “please be okay” over and over again.
Maybe this isn’t love, when I love I can find contentment knowing whomever I love is alright wherever they are.
But you, you I want here, with me. On the other end of the phone telling me about your day. With you, in your house playing housewife for real, knowing you are coming home, floating on the butterflies in my belly. With you in this room I made for us. I thought of you with everything I kept and everything I gave away.

I think of you always.
There is this one remaining red thread tying me to you.
It’s too fragile to pull.
So I stay still.

I’ve been left before. Worse than how you left but…
This is killing me.
I don’t want anyone else even looking at me.
I’m still yours and you’re gone.
I don’t understand how a god or a universe could finally let us find each other and then let you walk away.
Say something…
Anything.
Please.

Even if you tell me to fuck off, stop or go away.
Anything would be better than this silence I am forced to fill with my own thoughts and the echoes of the things you said and the things I didn’t get a chance to say.

Like I love you.