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 whenever I see you, 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.