A Lover of Another Kind
In an instant, you’ll occupy my mind and I become overtaken by the most surreal pang of emptiness. It doesn’t happen as often as before. I must admit it hurts less. Maybe these are markers, indicators that my heart is finding some way to heal. Still, though, my eyes well with tears thinking about you and everything we ever did. My first pure, unabashed love. I think about you holding me the day my dog died. It was your golden birthday. I baked a box cake and hung a handful of hand-drawn cards on your bedroom door. You stood on the dining table snapping pictures with your Nikon and I sat still feigning happiness with a sticky swollen face.
Sometimes all I want is one last time sitting in your car on the rooftop of the 5th Street garage. Talking about nothing and everything. Shit we only thought we knew. I miss your laugh so much it makes me absolutely sick. Remember that night we stripped naked and smoked an old joint on the floor of our living room, listening to Pink Floyd and staring at the TV trying to have some forced otherworldly experience of euphoria. I could never get high. I took one drag and dry heaved until my lungs swelled and I had to puff on my inhaler. Laughing with you was really the only drug I needed to feel good. That’s disgustingly cliche, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t true.
Admittedly, I write about you like a lover. Maybe you were. A different kind, of course.
I cannot tell if your decision to part was a testament of your growth or simply a refusal, a cruel abolition of my love. Why couldn’t I pull myself out of the fog of everything and realize you were hurting?
I cried last week in Chicago while seeing a play I know you would’ve loved. The lights dimmed and I bellowed silently in the dark feeling cold and utterly devoid of the warmth you took with you when you left. I thought I’d never be able to visit that fucking city again. I made it 24 hours before thinking about your hair blowing in the wind by Lake Michigan, catching the light of the fading sunset and the viewfinder of my camera. I couldn’t remember if we visited that museum on Black history or if we ever passed by the Bean.
How long before you are merely a series of old poems in my mind?
I hate to wonder, but do you think of me? Do you see white roses at the market and think about my bedside table? Do you listen to one of our records and think about the fall afternoons we‘d drive with the windows rolled down through Cameron Park, winding down the old tree-lined roads comfortably silent in our own reveries? Jesus — can you believe the frivolity of driving all the way out to the HEB in Woodway simply to catch a glimpse of a professor weighing cucumbers on a Sunday or padding behind a spouse or a child in plainclothes. So many things in 5 years and now I shudder to say your name.
