I should have been more patient, or perhaps wiser, to understand that I couldn't have you without your demons, that I wouldn't let you have me without the madness that hides in my soul. Perhaps I would have learned to appreciate the astonishing dance that our fears would perform, the very dance that would allow us to love each other in peace. But I didn't, and now I pursue you among flickering streetlights that blink in the night, on desolate bridges shrouded in mist. I will utter your name and a dozen more names, just in case you had chosen to live other lives while I attempt to deceive my thoughts, seeking to steal a last breath from our brief (so brief) history.
Perhaps this way the energy of our bodies could seep into another reality, a temporal glimmer where the conversation would extend beyond dinner without those awkward silences, in complete harmony; laughter turning into sighs and coffee at midnight when cold begins to bite, and you wrap yourself in my coat. An innocent pretext that would make you forget the unkind Monday that always steals you away from me, because I yearn to inhabit a world where we are not "I" and "your absence" waiting on this broken corner, where you might hear, like a sudden whisper taking you by surprise, the words I was too cowardly to say.
Maybe I can thus build a version of this life where the scent of your hair wouldn't end up imprisoned in the cell of my memories. Possibly coexist with you in a cursed and precise reality where I dared to kiss your lips beneath the stars because I'm exhausted of being a borrowed book, the narrator of a story in which I'm never the main character. I'm tired of being the third person in others' conversations, in supposed infinities. Today, I wish I could be the dream you had, the telephone number you dialled when bitter loneliness arrested you for a moment, the fragrance on your pillow and the morning coffee. But how can I live this entire life if it's imprisoned in the memories of my soul, alongside your scent and that exhaled pain?
The truth is, I'm tired of being the sum of our absences and tired of living within the confines of a fading memory that will soon be forgotten. And the yearning overwhelms me to the point of writing verses with our voices. Perhaps that way, you will have no choice but to look at me. Maybe you'll find curiosity inviting you to follow the letters I've written, and you'll end up hovering around the halo of my smile. Perhaps you'll have no choice but to dance again, to the rhythm of your demons and my madness, in a timeline where I dared to be the lead in a story that has been written so many times, to stop being the shadow in the margins of other dialogues.
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