“i. do you remember the night we sat on my back porch and talked about constellations and i counted your freckles like stars and you told me you want to go far far away and i told you you can’t, not without me and i think you smiled and everything seemed lovely, but that night was the night i realized everything was breaking. ii. it rained the day you left. pools of sadness welled up on the streets and i tried not to cry, but that was the day i realized you were the only one who ever really got me. or i thought you got me. maybe you were just the best one at pretending but everything that came out of your mouth made me shake in a good way. iii. or maybe it was in a bad way. maybe loving you wasn’t everything it was supposed to be. it was such an intense feeling, kind of like galaxies exploding in my chest or maybe a supernova: so beautiful but so tragic. iv. i’m trying to forget every good thing you ever said to me. i want it all to be red. i want it all to be ugly. i’m trying to forget how to love you, how to remember the bad times instead of the good, how you carved my heart out of my chest and left me in the wilderness, how you left me empty. v. but when i think of you, i just think of how your eyelashes look in sunlight, how your cheeks glisten in the morning air, how you’ve gotten me through some of the hardest times in my life. when i think of you, i think of sitting in your bedroom drinking wine out of the bottle and laughing and laughing and laughing, laying in bed with you, our legs intertwined and talking about our dreams in the pitch black darkness. vi. and i still feel it, even when i know i shouldn’t. it still eats at me like i am a parasite and my crooked mind is higher up on the food chain. i wish i could turn my brain off sometimes, the way you do. i wish everything i did wasn’t trying to impress you. vii. your sweatshirt’s still in my bedroom from months ago and i won’t get rid of it just in case you ever want to come back and get it. will you ever come back? do you ever think of me? are things always going to be the same as the day you left me? even when it’s sunny, i feel the rain clouds coming. viii. i guess what i’m trying to say is i’ll leave the light on on my back porch.”
— do you remember
