I should have known from the moment I got lost in you that it would be impossible to find the person I was before I touched your mousey hair. I should have foreseen that all the problems I tried to hide behind smiles and caresses, all the love we made, would accumulate in a postdated letter full of things I wanted to love for a lifetime but failed to keep to myself. Yet now, I am even more defeated than in my darkest hour, for the catalogue of memories that stole my heart is broader than before I fell in love with you. I continue to beat to the rhythm of agitation and vulnerability, the darkness of my body still lost in a swirl of scents that remind me of you. I should have known from the moment I devoted myself entirely to you that it would be impossible to find the remnants of the person I once was; between your breath and my skin, a destiny from which we could never escape was sealed.
The calendar has turned, and the clause marking our tumultuous and fleeting, dense and cathartic fate has ended. Here, I realise that I discovered new nuances of love while you tried to mend me. Your skin still smells like mine, that memory still conjures empty rooms with your scent and leaves me on my knees, wondering if you were the love that would change my life.
I didn't dare to stay by your side, to let you have a part of me forever. My ego left me on the curb of a love I thought would never exist, depriving me of continuing to adore you. Now, I carry more defeats than the tragedy of losing you. I cling to the impulsive reflex of loving you as if tomorrow the end of the world would find us a thousand times. I clutch the illusion that this page in my book contains an infinity of letters that will shelter my loneliness.
The infinite lasted so briefly this time, so briefly that I wouldn't doubt it will be eternal and forever shape the way I choose to live the days without you. A dream I wouldn't even consider in my most ungrateful moments, if only it allowed me to feel your tormented heartbeat once more. If only your perfect gaze, your vibrant smile, and everything that led me to understand how poems said with letters what it feels like to touch the sky with your fingertips, those tiny hands that could hold a thousand worlds, the ones I found and lost for you, and then to arrive at this precise moment where I face myself and doubt if I can convince myself to let you go, without life and without death, only a forgotten love.
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