Monday, August 28, 2006
by the world forgot

you used to always know when i was writing about you. mostly because i never said your name. i never saw the point in naming - it erases the intimacy of our two-person existence by allowing others into our tangled world. except now i wonder if you still know when i'm refering to you. (and there are so many 'you's, the webs of my relationships are impossibly strung)

two years is a very long time. in two years i've gone from being able to watch bridget jones' to being able to watch underworld, both terrible sequels to terrible movies. from veet to an epilator. from never riding the bus home alone to doing so everyday - and liking it. from believing that knights came in all shapes and sizes, to knowing that they never existed for me. from poetry to an awful, awful silence. i don't take out my barbies anymore - they line the ledge above my bed, their beautiful empty eyes gazing at doors that haven't been opened in years, hair mussed from leaning against their boxes. dolphins and dragons. yes, two years is a very long time. you thought things might change - you tried to extract promises from me that i threw at your feet, blindly, freely, desperately. well, guess what. they have and they haven't. all that i said wouldn't come to pass, hasn't. but the other things that we forgot to take into account, have. pride only goes so far, my dear. but it goes far enough for me to be able to look you in the eye and tell you that goddamnit, don't doubt me, woman!

it took me two years to begin to tell you what had really happened so long ago. it'll take me many more years to finish the story. we've gone 'round the sun twice, only to come back to the same spot in the first three dimensions, but an entirely different one in the fourth. which is all that really matters, isn't it? i've gone 'round twice, and never been back to you.

what is in a name, anyway? a promise that can never be fulfilled? a heartbreaking tenderness as it catches on goodbye? a memory and a face you can't forget? i don't always dream of faces, but i always know your name in my dreams. literally. i'm still waiting for you to fade into a blur that i can chuck aside and replace with a clean-edged photograph of a better specimen.

but the greatest joke of all is how i, who talk too much, waited til the dust had settled before telling even my closest friends, the ones i trust with my life, the ones who are my life, that there was even anything beneath the dust. and i wonder if i'd do things differently if i had to do it all over again. very probably not. we always begin by making the mistake that we were born to make.
10:03 PM ; 2 comments