“Wanna listen to the sound of you blinking // Wanna listen to your hands soothe // Listen to your heart beating // Listen to the way you move”
^{– Adrianne Lenker, anything}

A spiraling series of disastrous choices, and no one to hold accountable but myself. I have to tell someone how I feel but they have no interest in listening, so I will tell no one but this mostly empty ghost.

I think about autumn approaching and feel my heart start to race because I think about being with you while the weather changes. I can hear your warm laughter filling up spaces it has never been before. I want your big toothy grin, and I want to feel your teeth hitting against my teeth while we kiss. And it’s never made me feel better that this isn’t my fault, that it isn’t about me, because nothing with you has ever been about me, and this is only an extension of everything else. I would have settled for anything you wanted to give me. Crumbs, dregs.

You do not think of me and I cannot make myself stop thinking of you. I get myself off how you get yourself off – laying on your stomach – and pretend that it connects us somehow because it’s all I have. I feel like I’m crazy, and I think everyone around me feels it, too, and I just can’t let this go. You don’t have sex anymore, with anyone, so I think it was all fake. All of it, the entire time. And I am so sick of everyone else’s opinions, because they have never known you or loved you, and this feeling is singular to you. You talked about my body in a way no one ever had before and made me feel a safety in it that is locked behind a door I cannot open without you. But now you don’t have sex anymore, with anyone, so I think you were lying the whole time. And no one is ever going to feel that way about my body again, and even if they did, I would think they were lying just like you.

And maybe this would all be worth it if something could come of it – inspiration for art, a poem, a novel, a song, some form of healing, growing, learning – but there’s nothing coming. It’s useless pain. I wish I could go back to before I ever loved anyone. I regret it all.

I would listen to the same song and cry every time you left my place. Sometimes, I wouldn’t even wait until I got back inside. I’d turn it on the second your car door closed, and I’d wave and watch you drive away and walk through my building’s lobby with tears streaming down my face, snot running from my nose, because that’s how eager I was to miss you, to want you back before you’d even left. I used to listen to it and think about how scared I was to tell you I was in love with you, because I knew it was the most real thing I’d ever had to confess.

It has been years. The feeling is now warped by time, the memories softer around the edges, but that core – burning, almost painful to face sunlight – has never gone from me. I am waiting and waiting and waiting, and I think I will wait forever.

G.D.