And slowly, I started to miss him the tiny spaces that you just can’t get to. I missed him in the gap between moments. He stopped being a missing lung or a haunted street; instead, it had felt like something had been unstitched. His delicate weaves in my skin- his tender pulls and knots- were teased out, irreversibly and slowly. Each pulling thread was yet another wave in that ocean which kept us so far apart; the very ocean that continues to keep us in the fixed categories of ‘here’ and ‘there’.
It wasn’t that I was becoming unstitched myself, because I was still fully intact. I was still a whole. Losing him was a sort of numbing, draining, process. He was not an organ, preventing me from functioning, but he was vibrance. Things didn’t break without him. Things kept going, endlessly, tiresomely. I was stripped of colour, much like the northern sky that once streaked above us.
I missed him in sepia-toned sadness. Like our English summer, he was ephemeral and enchanting. But he flew away and I was left in a concrete jungle filled with hard faces and fake personalities. He stretched his wings whilst I had mine clipped. He found his paradise and I found my home in a cage.
I missed him lost on the underground, longing for his silent words of comfort and embraces sent along telephone wires. Only his voice could heal my woulds, and without it I was left cut and weeping. And I would call for him, desperately, endlessly, but he would never quite hear those words.
I stopped missing him at the dead of night, and started missing him at 3pm whilst having coffee with a half-beautiful man. I missed his curved teeth and curved speech. People here always asked questions, and I desperately missed his answers.
Eventually, I missed him when I realised that I had forgotten him. I missed him on that Sunday when neither of us remembered to call. I missed him when I realised our faces stained other people’s photographs, but not each other’s.
I missed him when I realised that he was coming home this month.
(image via tumblr)