Alyssa

“Before you kiss someone for the first time, just wait. Take a second to look at them. They are so new, so unfamiliar. Right now you don’t know how they taste, how their hands will press against your skin, how they’ll breathe. You won’t see them like this again. Look at them wanting - the apprehension in their eyes. They don’t know either. In their mind you are uncharted territory. Isn’t that special? Keep it. That’s how you’ll never lose them. Every so often afterwards look at them through these eyes. Don’t lose that wonder. Don’t lose the spark.”

What if I never love anyone the way I loved him?“ I asked the space. “You won’t,” it replied. “You never love the same way twice.”

“I wanted to call him,“ she said, ” just to see how he was doing. But you can’t do that. You can’t talk to someone who held your heart in their palm and pretend it never happened. “I wanted to ask why it was so hard to get over him. I wanted to know if he felt pain like knives in his sides like I did. I wanted to know if he ever felt lonely when he listened to music, or if things reminded him of the memories we made. “I wanted to say that I couldn’t remember the sound of him saying my name anymore and sometimes that scared me but I knew it was important, and that our last kiss wasn’t anything like in the movies, that it was so brief the wind had swept it away before I’d had a chance to commit it to memory. I wanted to explain how now I’d forgotten everything apart from the way he made me feel, like I could do anything, like love wasn’t just for perfect people, like love could also be for me. “So my god I wanted to call him, but instead I sat on the floor and drank shots like they were tea. To be honest I don’t know if I still loved him, but then I suppose you have to love someone to miss them like that; like hell, like absolute-fucking hell.

“If you said you missed me,” she says, “and I told you I missed you too, do you think we could do it over?” “We could relearn each other’s names and I could tell you about my childhood. You could get bored of my stories all over again and I could get mad like I always used to.” “And I’m not saying we’d work.” She murmurs, “I know that we probably won’t.” “But logic doesn’t mean I don’t miss you,” she says. “And right now I don’t give a damn about what logic has to say. Just tell me you miss me and I swear I’ll come running. Tell me you miss me and we can fall all over again.”

“You still love him,” he says, half question, half demand. “Of course I don’t.” She replies. But then part of her wonders whose arms she’d run into if she still had the choice. “You still think of him,” he whispers, when she’s turned off the lights and lies there trying not to give her thoughts away. “Go to sleep,” she says. But when her eyes are closed and she drifts between consciousness, she swears it’s his voice she hears and his fingers tracing the rise and fall of her ribs. “Do you miss him?” He asks. “No.” And it’s not a lie, not really. But part of her still remembers how he made her smile and how she buried her 2am laughter into his chest. Part of her still questions the possibility of seeing him again, and she thinks, maybe just once, for old time’s sake. “Would you go back?” He finally asks. And she can’t help herself. “Yes.” She says, “yes.”