All the pieces of our recent past

My days crawl along in slow motion. I walk around only half-present, living instead in my daydreams of being with you. Or even just around you. In my head, I constantly say your name. I love how it feels on my silent tongue, how it rolls effortlessly, endlessly between my lips and that space inside me where you live.

What are your days like now?

I asked you once if you sometimes think of me. You said, “All the time.” Am I in your mind now? Do you replay our nights together, hours spent talking and holding hands? Do you, too, marvel at how, after more than twenty years, we still can’t stop touching each other?

I sit at my kitchen table writing this, but I may as well be sitting next to you in a dark corner, our hands intertwined, our world reduced to those few square feet of space containing us. Together and apart from this world. For that moment, our love is right. And nothing to hide.

Moonlight in your eyes puts a spell on me, and you don’t even try

I drank a beer before dinner tonight. The taste reminds me of our nights together. Soon enough, I imagine that you are the one sitting next to me, and I let the dream linger a little longer.

I know it’s not the honest effort you want from me, but it will have to do for now. The pull of your memory is too strong still for me to begin giving myself to someone else. Even if that someone else is my rightful owner.

So for now, I survive by playing a farce. And hope that one of these days, the pretense will give way to genuine feeling, and that eventually, some part of me will once again learn to love this man enough to make it work.

Until then, I’ll hide behind every single thing that reminds me of you – and there are too many to count – and I’ll keep imagining that you are the one with me. And the dream will linger until my heart can’t tell the difference anymore.

It all feels so wrong

I’m about half an hour away from home. Where I have someone waiting for me. This is the place where I should belong. But I can’t help missing the part of my heart that remains too many miles away. The part that gives color and meaning to my life.

I’m tired. I know now the meaning of weariness. And I yearn for you. Many times each day. Every day of my life. All it takes is for evening to fall. Or the taste of cold beer on my lips. The strains of one of our hundred songs calling me back to you.

I don’t know why I continue to take one step after another, taking me farther away from you. Maybe what keeps me moving is the knowledge that this is what I should do, and the promise you extracted from me to give it one more good try. Even if my heart isn’t in it anymore. Maybe if every other part of me takes the leap, one of these days, my heart will follow suit.

For now, I console myself with the thought that this – even this – I do for you.

I’m still sleeping with your ghost

I’m sitting in an airline seat flipping through the movie channels. The cabin attendants are serving a meal again, but I can’t eat. My heart is heavy and you’re all that’s in it. Every song about love and loss and longing and aching and loneliness – they all remind me of you. Of this sweet and unbearably painful thing that binds us to each other. It’s a killing despair that I can’t live without.

I think about the last time I saw you. I watched in my rear view mirror as you walked away holding our music in your hands. In my head, Grace Potter sings of losing time and sleeping with ghosts. I close my eyes and remember how you touched me. The smell of your shirt. The taste of your kiss.

How is it possible that I am even more completely in love with you now? How can love grow so insistently deep when we are ripped apart by so many thousands of miles, endless days, and separate vows and obligations? Why is it that when I see you again, everything feels like the first time all over again?

How is it that a love this strong and permanent just isn’t enough?

I’ve been thinking about you, baby

I’m laying in bed waiting for sleep to come. You’re in my head — been there all day. Everything I feel, every glorious new experience comes with an instinctual urge to run to you and tell you all about it. It’s a reflex I’ve been fighting for twenty-two years now. After all this time, I’m still losing that fight.

I want to get up and write you a song. Some tune that says exactly what you are to me, with lyrics that’ll maybe make you shake your head and wonder how it is that I’m still so completely in love with you. A killer song with no answer for what becomes of us, only the unshakable determination to find a way to somehow be near you again.

But I can’t write songs. Not songs like that. And I can’t change how things are between us, and what we are to each other. And so I just keep laying in bed with you on my mind. Because in truth, that’s all I can do. Regardless of what they say, love really can’t move mountains. If it could, you’d be right here next to me, and I’d be in your arms tonight instead of writing you impossible letters in the dark, dreaming of an impossible life with you.

And now it’s only me again

The past months have not been kind to me. But even in the midst of all the drama, the thing I dread the most comes in less than two months, when your life takes a major shift and you slip even further away from me. I listen to our songs and it feels like my heart is slowly shattering to a thousand irreparable pieces.

Why do I feel like I have to prepare to say goodbye to you? Why does it seem like everything is inching ever so surely out of my reach?

If I asked, would you promise not to disappear from my life? Is that assurance even within your power to give?

I love you so much it hurts when I breathe.

Guide me home

Chris Martin said it best. I’m too in love to let it go.

“And the tears come streaming down your face
when you lose something you can’t replace,
when you love someone but it goes to waste.
Could it be worse?”

Please fix me.

Somewhere beyond everything we know

My mind keeps going back to those two nights we were together. A dark and cold music bar, a small table tucked away in a corner. I couldn’t tell you how many people were in there; I only knew I was finally near you again. Even the music was a blur of muted sound. There was just you and me, our clasped hands erasing any remaining distance between us.

Yesterday I caught myself playing the scene over and over in my head while driving in the afternoon heat. I had to stop and wonder if it was a dream, if those nights really happened. So many of my dreams revolve around you that I no longer know where wishful thinking bleeds into reality.

But then I remember the warmth of your hand. The deep, tingling resonance of your voice. The smile you gave me as I rushed to wrap my arms around you. The possessive insistence of your fingers as you traced mine, silently handing me back the ring on my finger, removing all evidence, any reminder of our lives apart from each other. The long, sad sigh when we both wondered what happens to us now, barely hiding the resignation of knowing neither of us had an acceptable answer.

And oh, I remember that kiss.

I want to be yours for one day. Twenty-four hours. That’s all. Completely yours, with no thought of consequence.

Perhaps if I dream it enough, it will come.

“Someday we’ll find truth and peace of mind
And I’ll still love you then.”

Is it love or is it me?

Airplanes and deserts and winding hills everywhere, and as I gaze at the wonderful vistas before me, I am painfully aware of that familiar feeling inside that reminds me of the distance between us. Every new place awakens the part of me that feels like I am on my way home to you. You are everywhere I go, all the warm and rich voices that speak to me, all the tall and lanky strangers whose eyes linger on mine just a little while longer. You are in every new song about love. Longing. Regret.

I am hours closer to you, hoping for a chance for an unhurried conversation. I tell you that I wish I could ask you to hop on a plane, meet me in Monterey for an afternoon stroll and dinner that ambles on into the morning. You answer sweetly, “Wish I could, baby.”

I wish the same thing too.

I am imagining white cars and long stretches of quiet sand. Sunsets and sunrises and the lingering smell of answered prayers in the air. In my mind, our dreams have the color of fire, the feel of cotton, the taste of cloves. And the sound of a thousand songs and a thousand poems, all of them unable to adequately describe what you are to me, and how your love is my life.

All the love that this heart can stand

A haunting recording of John Mayer playing “Gravity” plays through my tinny speakers as I sit in front of this screen. I have a blurred photo of you on my desktop, stolen by our friend in the middle of a poker game. You look terribly pixelated, thanks to the dim lighting and the unsteady hand of someone trying to steal a shot of you, knowing how much you hate being photographed.

But it’s still you. Your likeness. For once, I feel like I can watch you, memorize your features. My screen is smudged in the lower right corner, where your photo is displayed. It’s almost embarrassing to admit, but yes, I sometimes half-consciously run my fingers over that precious square inch of smooth glass, as if to caress your face, your cheek, that soft part of your neck just above the collar. I know it’s lame, but what can I do? I miss being with you.