Memory, or Dream?

To You:

I never did get around to telling you why I was disappointed, did I? I suppose you never stuck around long enough to realize I actually am capable of emotions. At least, I seem to have discovered this capacity to be true.

You did ask what it was I wanted. I wanted to see you write, to be a part of the process and not apart from it. I didn’t want to merely be the “muse” that inspired your creations, I wanted to be the brush you dipped into the ink.

I watched as you traded your soul for your body; your writing for your running. One could only hope you were merely creating the experiences you would later on depict. I realized, perhaps whatever we were was that experience you never knew existed…

But, I was disappointed, nonetheless, for you were so fixated on being a result that you skipped the entire process of us.

Pain, that’s inevitable. It’s part of life. Not the only part, of course, just the part that motivates people like you to write. Your projection of me was the pain you sought; loving me was the provocation you were looking for since you discovered your wellspring of creativity. It was the darkness you needed after being in the sun too long. Somehow along the way, you lost your torch, so you ran ‘soon as the shadows moved with the winds.

Anger, however, that was on me. That was my storm. I was looking for that provocation, knowing that your childlike desire for a utopian creation would most definitely invoke my rage. Why? Because for me, growing up was never a choice. My innocence was stripped from me the moment I could put two syllables together and figure out what words were.

Believe me, innocence of the mind is not something of which I am familiar. Innocence of the heart, perhaps, but mind? Nay.

And there you were, a physical representation of all that I had left behind, a version of my younger self that you had chosen to portray in my present. A self I thought was history. There you stood.

Still, I write this now, after all this time, because being both blessed and cursed with an infallible experiential memory renders you an experience I cannot forget.

Cannot, and also choose not to try.

While I do miss the memories we only halfway created, darling, I find it hard to miss you. What disappoints me, love, is that…

…I never knew you.

Not the way I wanted to anyway, you never let me. You feared me more than you loved me, and ran though there was nothing to fear. By the time you discovered I’m actually harmless, your shoes were so worn and torn that you wondered if it was even worth coming back. To me.

And yet here we are, after all this time, still writing, still breathing the same air, still sharing the same city space — that unrefined space of a place you know I can only call home. Here we are, after months, and all my unspoken feelings and untold truths spill like word vomit, time and time again. Here we are; here I am, still writing. Still thinking of you. Still loving you.

Still wondering…if your existence is a memory or a dream…

I miss…the you I never knew.

MG

P.S. HB, R.