graphic by kayleigh woltal
When I try hard enough – which does not take much these days – I am in the room with you, alone, and we are a silent form of loudness in each other’s lives, welcome and consolatory, midnight-like. We are so far away from each other now. I do not know if you still like tomatoes and eat them with American cheese for lunch. I do not know if your family got a new cat, foster dog. I do not know if you remember the time I fell asleep, with a fever, and you brought me dinner, laid it on my desk, and left me a note – a form of tenderness I was not privy to until then. I think there is an absence now. I think I feel it in the heaviness in my chest, the hesitancy I have toward letting someone in closer now, thinking that they might forget me just as you seem to have no memory of me. I think I dream too vividly at night – dreaming about you reaching out again, from nowhere, out of the blue. Your presence has not been lost on me. I don’t know if I would have anything to say to you anymore. My anger has dissipated, my memories of you have diluted to a point of foreign blurriness. My sadness is the only thing that is left. And I have learned to live with sadness. I imagine sitting with you and talking through the past two years. Maybe you have milk. Maybe I have tea. Maybe we’re outside, on the lawn, or on the Tyler porch swing. But I don’t quite remember your voice as well as I once did. And things are different now.