The problem was never a matter of loving you, of wanting you, of almost everything that surrounded you. It was the combination of it all, of that tangled web of lies, those disastrous spirals that sprang up to swallow us whole that became the problem. Whispered words choked to an early grave in the light that dawn brought with it that craved only to make you understand the ways in which I ached. Ached for your fingers against my bare skin, for the heat of your breath against my neck, for your hands in mine, for the rush that you provided. Justice would never be done by the words that I could whisper, that I could scream in fits of rage and ecstasy, that I could say casually with a smile you once called sly.
These are the flickers of you that I am faced with in the dead of night, when my soul grows restless and my mind has nothing but time to wander. Through the hall, down the stairs to a couch tainted with flashes of times spent together that I simultaneously want to burn to destroy what remains and keep alive as long as possible to stop you from disappearing. Ghostly renditions of our domestic life still haunt the nooks and crannies of this house monthly, weekly, daily, hourly. Jumbled together images that come and go from view, jarring in ways that I cannot fully grasp like the puffs of smoke I exhale on the deck at midnight as I try to detach myself.
