Sunlight lazily slips between cheap metal blinds to the left of the bed where I lay. The clock reads 1:43pm as a tear swells up before making a break for it across the surface of my skin. This was the hot, heavy kind of tear. The tear that reminds you not that you are sad, but that you have tasted defeat at your own hands. The kind of tears that of their own existence, give you reason to cry.

I’m thinking back on better days, or maybe just more favorable ones. Moments when we were both different people with such different motives. Phrases and old jokes pass by like friends no longer recognized.

I remember the day we met, which was long after the day I first saw you. I still know things I’d never told you because I didn’t know they were important. Like how hard I tried to get you to notice me before that. How the best part of my week until that point involved pining after you and imagining what you were like. Maybe my biggest regret was never mentioning that for once in my life, everything turned out exactly like it should have, exactly like the movies.

I remember that when I met you, you were dating my asshole of a best friend. He wrote you a poem after a week, and I googled it because I didn’t believe he had the intelligence to write it, and didn’t deserve to give it to you if he did. There were weeks spent in sabotage, embarrassing explanations to my mother for grass on my back, stories we told each other at night we were ashamed of in the morning. That was our first month.

But I remember the last moment we were who everyone knew we were, each others. The flight home was a struggle, how torn I was about us already, and the message you left me.
I heard your words when you picked me up that night, and the finality of what you were really saying. I got out of your car, and walked away. I walked a mile or two before going somewhere and doing something.

Now I think about all the things you expressed to me I couldn’t understand, lines from classic literature that no one will feed me anymore. Lines from Wuthering Heights about different kinds of love, and how once love has had it’s season it can come again, but it won’t be the same as before. 

And I’m thinking how things aren’t the same as before, and I’m remembering.