Order #17

My friend asks me how long it's been since I've talked to you and I lie and tell her I don't know. It's been a month since we've spoken, but I have to change the "days since you've been in my dream" whiteboard to 0. You made a mess and laid across my bed and gave me that cheeky grin and it was exactly as if you had walked into my waking life. 

Just a month, and yet I feel like more has shifted in that month than the six I couldn't let you go. Every day when I drive home from work, I see the monsoon clouds gathering on the horizon, and I think of last summer. How I spent my nights out beyond the city, down a dirt road, with a little sandy dog, and you. 

I saw a psychic and she told me that I still had a few lessons yet to learn from you. I know she's right because I can still feel the memory of that house shifting through my body, the energy you planted seeping up from my bones, making its way through and out. I can see now what I couldn't see then, but it doesn't make my heart ache any less. It doesn't stop me from wondering if you've moved on to someone else (you have to admit, you moved on to me pretty quick), or looking for you on every motorcycle I pass, or wishing I could have been the one to make your life safe and whole and stable, like you deserve.

My therapist would say it's not actually about you. It's about me, and what I lost, and what I face. 

I went to the Mexican restaurant we used to go to, and I ordered pozole, and I sat in the same booth we used to. I sat there and I looked across at us, at my legs draped over yours, and wondered if I'll ever feel that again, or if that kind of aching need for closeness only comes from a chasm inside that I am working so hard to fill.