I still love you.⁰
I need to say it right now because if I don't do it right now I'll spend the whole time building up to it and then lose my nerve¹ and get lost in a note about graph algorithms, and then you'd see exactly what I did and you'd give it some silly name, and you'll be right like you always are, and I would have just wasted both of our time.
I still miss you. The one who burned holes in my brain thirty seconds into kissing you and kept burning. The one who wanted me back in a way that made everything previous to you a dress rehearsal. The one who identified the precise periodicity of my psychological damage². You noticed things I hadn't told anyone. You noticed things I hadn't noticed myself. The one who was unreasonably, almost unfairly funny, and also (I want this on the record) unreasonably, almost unfairly beautiful, and the combination of those two things in one person is so excessive that I genuinely believe it should have been subject to some kind of international regulatory body, and I am aware that I am the last person who should be complaining about this, and I'm not complaining, I'm just saying it out loud because I didn't say it enough when it would have counted.
I know you're okay.³ I know you found your way back to yourself and you don't need me to tell you that you're going to be fine because you already know and you were always going to be. That's not comfort because it's more like a specific kind of sadness like the kind where you're glad someone is okay and sad about it at the same time. I can hold both of those things and they don't cancel each other out, they just sit there next to each other being heavy which is a thing I have gotten very good at lately.
I had a whole system written down and felt super smug about it. And then you turned the full beam of your attention on me and I didn't know what to do with it, because I am the person who sees, not the person who is seen, and you saw everything, and instead of staying in the room with it I went somewhere unreachable and called it drowning in my own weather. The man who notices everything noticed nothing.
I know how I left. It is not exactly the grand gesture of a man who has his emotional infrastructure together. It is in fact precisely the behavior of someone who has voiced vehemently and at length about the dangers of sealing yourself inside your own logical cave and then, at the first sign of structural stress, immediately seals himself inside one. I know this. I am aware of the irony. I am sitting in it and it hasn't become more comfortable.
I still love you and I still miss that version of you specifically, the one I don't get to have. And that's the right ending to this particular story even though it doesn't feel like one from inside me. I tried to carry something into an empty room. Wrong timing because nobody would have been home. I'll need to figure out what to do with that soon. In the meantime I hope you're doing exactly what you do while looking exactly how you do as someone who never needed the room I tried to build for you.
You found yourself just fine.
⁰ Don't worry, this isn't about you :>
¹ She would have clocked this immediately. She clocked everything immediately. That was the thing about her.
² She got it from Saturn. I believe her.
³ She's somewhere right now being extremely funny about this. Diagnosing it in the most accurate and brutal possible terms. She's better at that than I am and I mean that sincerely.
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