I Told You I Would Write About You Someday

I tilt my head to the side whenever I think of how you kissed me just behind my left ear that night I said goodbye. I catch myself doing it less and less as time goes by. But today is different. Today, I remember.

I resolved to stay outside your door. But you pulled me in anyway. Partly by force, but mostly, by my own foolish desire to see, for just one more time, what we had already irretrievably lost.

Your apartment smelled devastatingly of happier times — of slept in sheets, of freshly laundered his-and-hers towels, of multicolored pills lined up neatly on an immaculately sanitized countertop.

Of you.

Everything looked the same. On your shelf was a Post-it with “You are my home” written in my shoddy cursive. And on your table was a copy of “Brief Answers to the Big Questions,” within which you’ll find many other Post-its. One hidden behind the flap of the back cover says, “There are many questions we’ll never have the answers to. But one thing is certain, I will always care for you.”

You shot me a look of concern.

That look of concern.

You know the one — knitted brows, gaze down, a slight frown. The look I always put on your face. Sometimes, by accident. But more often than not, intentionally. You seemed older and I worried that I had aged you with my delusions of invincibility and my tendency to make you think of all the ways you could lose me.

You asked me what was wrong and I had no words to give you. Only tears. So unexpected, I would have thought us reconciling was a more likely occurrence.

Imagine that.

The impossible had better odds of happening, or so I believed.

You have to understand, I arrived with the intention to leave with nothing but my possessions, my head held high and dreams of building a future where I would thrive without you. Instead, it looked as though I would be walking away with artifacts from a lost era, my eyes fixed firmly to the floor and nightmares of how, if I’d done things differently, I might have been able to keep you.

That’s why when you kissed my hands, I pulled away. When you pressed your lips onto mine, I clenched my jaw shut and looked down at my feet.

I was not angry with you. I was disappointed in myself.

I declared that I wanted to leave. I reached for the door and you held me back. So forcibly that you left a mark on the back of my hand. For the few days it was there, I gazed at it fondly. Wishing it wouldn’t fade away. Because to me, it was evidence, that at least once you fought to make me stay.

You told me you couldn’t let me go. That you loved me too much to do so. I wept even harder. Because they did not seem like words spoken out of love but out of something that might have once been love.

Because the truth is, even when love is gone, habits can remain.

I do not want to need you. I do not want to walk into a crowd and see only you. I do not want to meet a perfectly nice person and wish he was you.

And yet, when you carried me to bed and held me until I stopped crying, I knew there was nothing else in the world I wanted more but to be loved by you again.

But we all want things we shouldn’t have, don’t we?

You told me you were lost. That you felt you had no purpose. I told you you were young and that you were exactly where you needed to be.

But one thing I left out is that we just aren’t in the same place anymore, and that’s something I’m learning to accept.

I hope that when you read this, you will know that all of the things I said that day were true. I do pray for you every night, I do expect big things from you and I am leaving but I’m not sure if I’ll be back.

But if we ever meet again and you see me tilting my head to the side, know that I remember.

Know that at one point in your life, someone looked at you with the most profound fondness and affection.

Know that the habits remained but, quite possibly and in all probability, right along with them stayed love.