(trying to) move on

You were like a fire out in the biting cold of the wilderness — born of fallen, broken twigs, and I was cold, out in the open and I knew you provided warmth. But the warmth got hotter, and hotter and hotter, and the closer I got, the more you burned my skin, into the very spots of my mind that told me to say no as I stayed on because I told myself that even the brightest of flames and sharpest of knives needed the concern we were always too afraid to give. You were worth the try, you were worth the burn — the scars now serve as a reminder to guard my bare heart.

Last night, I went home and scrubbed my skin twice as hard under the running water in an attempt to forget the warmth of your arm that once laid so comfortably against my own. I reread the stories you used to tell me, the stories that elicit your speech with every word I say. I listened to the music you once exchanged with me, hearing your voice ring with every phrase, with every melody that speaks. And I remember our long bus rides down to the very ends of street names we can't even pronounce and the nights we stood on the overhead bridges for the sole purpose of watching the peacefulness of empty roads. I remember all the times I forced you to take a photographs with me (the photographs still hang from the frame of my bed, alongside the flowers you gave me on our first date). But the flowers are dead — the memories are not, and neither are the people. Memories are meant for the past and people are meant to move on — life just works that way. Before today, I brushed off the looks of pity they gave me, I smiled all the time and told people that I was ready to move on and that I didn't need you but there was always that little part of me that died with every time I saw your shadow or heard your voice and I could lie to the whole world but I can't lie to myself and I know that I yearned for your attention like deserts crying for rain. Perhaps tonight I will go home crying and maybe it will be the same tomorrow or even the day after, but one day you will be a distant memory — a snapshot from the past. I don't hate you, I don't ever want to hate you. There was something. And that is better than nothing at all.

(forgive me for the poor organization of thought I wrote this on a bus ride home and my mind was all over the place)