Twinkling effervescence surrounded you

as I watched you throughout the days

where the grass melted deeper into its own pigment,

and I came to know you in a world that functioned the way I imagined it should.

 

But as all things become overdue,

you transformed into a shadow of yourself—

a reflection where the real you was trapped behind the glass

as someone else inhabited your body and kept you there.

And you diminished and flickered out overtime;

you were an old bulb that couldn’t hold out any longer, for me,

but I didn’t let go.

 

So as you were miserable, I was happy,

but the kind of happy where I knew something was wrong;

so, never truly happy.

Because I knew that flicker I was looking for in you

wouldn’t be coming from a place of truth,

but instead would create a sense of false hope for me.

 

An original intention of mine was never to be forgotten by you,

but we stood on a snowy road where I couldn’t make out anything in the distance.

The haze from the almost-midnight sky cast a shadow on the snow allowing no reflection

in its normally glowing white mass.

And it was gray, but I was warm.

But at the end was you, and,

even though I could only make out the reminiscence of a figure in the haze of snow flurries

floating through a world with the saturation turned down,

it was you.

I know you knew it was me

because it was that kind of a connection where you just know.

 

Everything fell into place as I watched you turn

to face away.

As I watched your back,

the snowflakes stood vibrating out of the corner of my eye,

and the woman letting her dog out retreated back into apartment number eleven.

 

But then it all shattered,

and the snow began to pound down so hard

on my tired bones

that I collapsed into a heap among the other fallen snow soldiers below my feet

in this blizzard.

The dog began to bark

unceasingly,

and still does to this day.

 

And constant headaches are better

than learning to live without you in silence.

 

So I craft the narrative in my head,

and I hold your clay figurine like a puppet in my hands.

I set you on the shelf towards the far corner,

so you are almost out of sight

but not enough for me to stop hurting,

and not enough for me to stop revisiting you from time to time.

But sometimes there’s silence that’s inescapable,

so I spend the nights toying with an imaginary you,

one that lives forever, and whenever, in my state of mind.

Because I refuse to believe we were created just to be destroyed,

so I hold onto every piece of you that I can.

 

And I still can’t find the line between the idea of you and who you really are,

because I fear I never knew in the first place,

so I have stopped questioning.

Even the notion of admitting a wrong I did by you

breaks me from the inside out.

I would have to acknowledge that the pain I’ve felt in your absence

was inflicted by myself.

And then I would find a real reason to hate myself,

because no amount of numbers on a clock allow a high enough count

for me to run away from my own poison.