#4trey

ghosts are real and they’re everywhere. in old photographs tucked safely in a box under your bed. in the walls of your childhood home waiting for you to come back. they live in old text messages and emails. forever frozen in time. they haunt your old best friends neighborhood. flickering in the street lamps. occasionally, on very rare summer afternoons; when the sun shines through the kitchen window in a certain way and all of the sudden you get this feeling in your stomach of melancholia; that is a haunting. a possession. those are ghosts trying to find comfort in the present because the past they once lived in no longer exists.

let’s play house for a weekend. we can go grocery shopping like real couples. i’ll sit on the counter and watch you cook pasta and we’ll drink expensive wine out of plastic cups. we can wear invisible rings and talk about a future that will never exist. i like the way my first name sounds when it’s attached to your last. ill trace the veins on your arm while you kiss the freckle on my hip. you’ll say it’s your favorite. we’ll say we’re making love instead of just fucking. i’ll wash your hair in the shower if you help me fold my laundry. we can pretend we’re in love and afterwards we can go back to our real lives. the empty wine bottle and bruise on my lip that was made with love will be the only evidence that you existed in my world. there’s a certain kind of beauty and sadness in the ephemeral.

i talk to you in dreams. you still love me there

sometimes i’ll find an old picture in my camera roll and i’ll feel like i can’t breathe but i can smell the crisp autumn air and how those jeans felt on my skin. i remember my old car and all the bends on the road to my grandmas house and how she loved how colorful the trees were. as if it was a celebration of life right before the end. i remember how the smell of coffee would linger in my clothes after my shifts and how the sun would shine in a way that you’d only see at 4pm on a tuesday afternoon in october. before it all went bad. when they were just a five minute drive away instead of five years. when my name was still safe in their mouth. i can’t seem to catch my breath when i come across these pictures but i can’t seem to delete them either. forever frozen in time a memory of before.

did you have good day today? did you wear that one sweater you always said you loved? is your hair still long? how’s your mom? did you ever get that tattoo? do you still think about me? how’s your little brother? do you still listen to that one band? do you still think about that day? do you know that i still do? can we have one more summer together? have you forgotten everything?

and we may never have enough time but its a warm summer evening straight out of a van gogh painting and you’re laughing on the fire escape at some joke i made and for a moment it feels like we have all the time in world

i would have stayed there forever. tracing my name on your back in the early hours. but there’s never enough time is there? that was all the time we had. that was all the love i could give. but it was never enough. you’ll keep my heart as some prize behind glass and i’ll die in my room a thousand times over but i’ll never call. instead i’ll pray for lavenders to grow where the emptiness is. i hope to come back in the next life as someone who doesnt feel things as deeply.