Where Have You Gone?

Consequentially, I am triumphed as I recognize these ebbs of emptiness stem from you. Your absence, your lack thereof, is stifling to the entity that we created together, persistent and aching, synapses still firing like a phantom limb.

I used to see you outside of Old Cap, I used to see you in mid evening, I used to see you pulsing to the last bit of warmth the sun could muster in the means of winter. I had no business to be in that part of town, and then you were there. And we had every reason to be together, separated by the passenger side window, brisk air and auburn hair. You did not see me.

Where have you gone?

You are not here anymore. Now I have a purpose to walk past, and you are nowhere. You are buried under Descartes or Aquinas and existential questions, too busy for the girl you shot in the neck with time and rhyme, lit on fire, intertwined with nature and Iambic pentameter to douse with salt and alcohol.

I do not see you anymore. I wonder if you moved back home, snuffed completely our dreams of New York Times and red herrings to be normal. To have kids, to get engaged, to get married, be married and entirely uncertain, lay awake with the work of a Platonist with that being your most vexatious intrusion; I hope it is in the house you designed when you were sixteen.

I do not have time for you much anymore. It is my due to keep you alive longer than anyone will supersede as you fill the vials of muse, any other inspiration is a tease. Blows to the head are soothing to my missing appendages. I will keep you vibrant and safe like your first drafts and Gravity, because I know you remember me that way too. I will spare the details for now; you will always hold me in the most generous exposure, the only keeper of my virtue.

You are a burden at greater distance. Times we spent in broad day light are minimal to years in the dark, sharing the same electrical box in the dying grass, and I am not comforted by the time passing. I am a survivor to many and only a victim to you. Let me breathe you in words on pages nevertheless. Let me frame you with hope and the life we could have, should have, would have had.

Where have you gone?