Three Years

The memories of us feel like poison in my veins, but the pain I feel at the thought of you does not matter because I still love you. You may be gone now and on to someone new, but the nostalgia of the smell of your hair and the touch of your fingertips still sends a chill from the back of my neck to the tip of my spine. Sometimes, I swear, I smell your cologne on my sheets or feel your hands on my skin. Thoughts of you plague my mind 24 hours a day—when I sleep, I dream of you and when I wake, I think of you.

It could be raining and I’m wearing jeans with holes in them, smelling oddly of floral perfume and fumes, red lipstick on my mouth like skin or I’m driving in my car or buying a movie ticket or texting my mom and I feel you in my bones. Just for a few seconds—long enough for you to linger, long enough for me to notice.

It has been years and I still remember how your laugh tasted on my tongue, like honey and something else, something foreign. I hold your name in my liver like liquor, I hold your words in my spine like acid.

It has been three years and I miss you. I miss you so much it hurts my ribs some days. The sky is cracking and the sun is yolk and everything is smoke except the memory of you, the memory of us.

Leaving you was never an option because it does not make sense to let go of something you have wanted for so long, but it also doesn’t make sense to hold on when nothing is there. I lost you. You lost faith in us, in me, and so I lost you. I didn’t know what to do or how to fix it and I still don’t. However, I know, in my heart that if you called me right now and asked me to, I would go back.

I would do it all over again if it meant I got to spend another minute with you because I still believe you and I are meant to be together in the end. I knew it when we first met and I still know it now. There was this sense of familiarity when we first started seeing each other—not love at first sight, but a realization of ‘Oh, it’s going to be you.’ So for that reason, I am going to keep on loving you and keep on missing you.

No amount of months filled with silence forced between us will ever change the fact that I still love you and I always will.

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Three years later, a new girl sits cross-legged on your bed. She tastes like a different flavor of gum than you are used to. She picks up a book sitting on your nightstand, one you insists you had to read for school last year. As she flips through the pages, an old worn photograph falls out of the sixth chapter. Now, she sits cross-legged with two unfinished stories resting in her lap. Inevitably she asks, and you tell her.

You say: I dated her a while back.

You don’t say: Sometimes when I'm holding you, I imagine the smell of her perfume.

You say: She was younger than me.

You don’t say: The fifteen summers in her bones warmed the eighteen winters my skin had weathered.

You say: It’s nothing now.

You don’t say: But it was everything then.