vi, unfiltered

vi <3

every thought I have of you pervades my memory like a perfect example of a parasite and yet the druglike, codeine nature of it all has this grip on my heart almost as strong as you do (the thought of you is not the same as you). If god saw the way I'd treat you he'd be so jealous that he'd make another sin. In the light, I want to be your shadow. In the dark, I want to be the rays of lamplight falling clumsily over your face (do you make everything lose balance? I swear gravity herself falters at the sound of your voice). In the in between, fading twilight and rising moon, I want to be yours. perhaps that is the least likely to come true of them all. I cannot want you enough for you to want me too. your gene code must be beautiful written in every language. every atom of yours makes me weak in the knees and desperate in the eyes. somehow, I love the way you think more than I love the way you dress. my irises are cobalt and yours are magnets– pulling away feels like warring with my own soul. every birthday wish I've had, I wish I had spent on you.

I wish I could curl between the frets of your guitar and your fingertips. I wish I could be the messily scrawled annotations in the margins of your books. I wish I could be your morning birdsong and midnight skyline. If I wish to hold you, is it enough to say I have?

On days we aren't together, I find you in the bottom of my still-warm soup bowls and a craving for sichuan. You look back at me from the roughened glass of my window, from the blurry reflection of a thumbprint on my phone screen– residue from a phone call ended too quickly and texts left unseen, unsent. I search for you in the dirtied copper of my prayer lamps, discovering you in the spot of my fingertips instead. Blackened palms trace creases you left within my origami heart, then unfold them like cheap fortunes from cookies shaped of currencies different from my own. Is it wrong to say the lines left behind are remnants of your full smiles? The clouds whisper your secrets back to me like sick echoes of July nights. I cover my ears like it makes a difference. Sometimes, I swear the pounding of my head, of my heart, is the rhythm of your voice and your drumming fingers on your phone’s keyboard. I miss imagining my laughter was the melody to your unintentional cadence. I miss wishing you would listen to it with purpose. For now, I will hope I am not the only one haunted by muffled speakers in neighbourhood malls and buskers on streets in a city quite unlike Paris. I will continue stumbling past ghosts of you in my needs and wantings. As the nights pass, so will this. So will you.