Slow Fade

slow fade

tide slowly washing away

traces of you in me

When I think about you, it doesn’t hurt quite so much anymore.

That scares the hell out of me I’m not going to lie to you,

I don’t want to let this go

but it’s happening whether I want it or not.

Sometimes I think the heartache is preferable to slowly forgetting the way that your hands feel,

strong like sandstone red rock monoliths

maybe if I write it down I can save it forever,

archive these memories

but it never seems to work that way

lately I haven’t been able to write much at all,

this monotony day to day grey haze has got me feeling

glazed-eyes not even enough energy to be restless

I can’t focus

not since I met you

but it’s not all about you so much anymore, is it?

it was nice to lean on you

I feel honestly that I could have done so for the rest of my life

but that’s never the way it was meant to be, me,

sometimes I feel that I am the best version of myself when I am alone.

I’m an instinctive leader, I interrupt a lot

I’m working on it

but it was nice to let you take the reins some of the time

and even nicer to know that I could, too, if i wanted

driving home in the quiet time of the night

I feel like we could have relied on each other,

we made a good team

strong personalities, individualists,

as natural alone in bed at night, transmitting whispers, kisses, touches from point A to point B

as in a crowd, sharing cigarettes and truth with pseudo-strangers

but that’s exactly why this won’t work

why we drift in our separate directions

because we sleep on our stomachs, only touching at the ankle

because neither of us ever cared much for social media

because you held me tighter when you talked about flying

because I could gaze out the window forever while you drove

because you asked me to dance and I laughed, told you no,

because we told our scariest stories in half steps, over months

because I’ve never been able to sit still

because you can make a new friend in ten minutes or less

because we both sleep with the window open

because we both came to the same conclusion separately,

both saw the next year laid out before us, crystal ball gaze

we each had our own premonition

knew that we were each about to find ourselves far from home,

but not together

I miss you

I don’t think that’s ever going to change

no matter how much time passes