You were as real as a romance projected onto a brick wall, one I sped my car into over and over again, expecting to build a tunnel into the world I saw before me. Although you felt good on my body, you were never there. Although you sounded like a song, you never heard me. You were a placeholder, a cornerstone that held together a fiction I desperately clung to in the absence of a memoir, for as it stood- my life was not the story I wanted to tell.
You are as much a victim in all of this as I was, although unharmed. The gross indecency of falling in love without your express permission, but holy hell, it couldn’t be avoided; You were too kind a person to a person too broken. I caught you like a disease.
I wish you had been ugly. I wish you had left me unseen in the dark corridor to sulk and wallow with my swinish thoughts and notions, nodding in agreement with the chorus of others who pointed, laughed, and confirmed the worst. Instead, you held out a torch, lifted me from the cold earth, and wiped the dirt from my cheek. In the light, I saw in you what I had lost in me.
I had a spark once, doused by a tsunami of expectations dismally unfulfilled. I learned to survive by condoning their actions, believing lies, and fabricating a reality I had brought on myself- to gain control, to own the narrative, yadda. A sad tale, although not original in the slightest, and you a key character, a figment of my imagination, a device- an elaborate metaphor.
I was baited by your ability to see what I could not see in myself, drawn and quartered by your inability to deliver it over and over again, to assign worth, as I had none to give myself.
I still think of your hair when I smell the salt of an ocean breeze or spearmint on someone’s breath. I often hold out hope that a co-worker or well-meaning patron standing in the checkout line may lean in a little too close in the event they may be carrying a trace of you.
You were nothing more than a phantom, as much a ghost as I walking the rooms of your empty apartment on a summer afternoon, grasping at the fleeting memories we’d shared - merely cracks in the imagined pavement of our fiction.