#incompatible

You’re beginning to feel more like a memory and less like an experience. Like under the right set of wrong circumstances, I could get my already feeble mind to believe you were a product of my imagination. A dream. A hallucination. A beloved character from a novel I read once some very long time ago that I can see and almost hear somewhere in the back of my head. I can go back. Find you tucked away between long and winded paragraphs about the joys of life and the richness of sadness. I know the pages in which you exist. I know your lines. Your places. Your people. But who is she? Who is the woman occupying the other end of the sofa? Who is nestled in between your sheets and underneath your arm? Who takes uncontested possession of the passenger seat of your car? Who is the narrator of the story we told? For it can’t be me. It can’t possibly be that she and I are the same woman, existing in a togetherness that seems mercilessly cruel to us both. It cannot be that I had you only to lose you, and that I got to experience you only to be reminded of you during one inconspicuous Tuesday morning, three years down the road, when a word suddenly reminds me of a joke we shared in an empty parking lot under a full moon while unintentionally wearing each other’s favorite color.

'You have no regard for my sensibilities at all. You are so very selfish. I was quite deceived in you.'

I would have wanted nothing than to mean something more to you But I understand that is a tall ask for someone living by carefree rules. I know there is nothing that itches you to spill ink on the page By how I live my life in solitude and writing beside the flame.