Age: 22
and it was so unfair of the phone, that it failed to connect us on the last night of the cherry blossoms, for reasons neither of us can explain -- when we could have drank to another year of my life, as the wind plucked out the straggling petals; the product of a year's anticipation.
i wish he hadn't told me once the last ones had already settled on the ground.
because i hate knowing, now, that we were close enough between trees that i could have yelled and he would have answered, his voice carried also by that wind. but instead i left, and he thought that i was farther away, chasing some dream in a country farther away, when i was left, crying for the last hour of my twenty-first year, thinking of all the years to come; thinking of how i never planned
to be alone for them.
and i am. in my bed, and in his shirt.
he is in my sheets and my pillow -- in his bed,
while my head is against my own, drifting so far away
...
thinking of another summer wedding that i will miss. and a dance
that is his to miss, not mine.
and these are all the thoughts piling up now, like refuse on the side of the road, that were once pretty but are now settling into patterns, same as cigarette butts and other little bits of trash. and as i walk beside that road on the way to my home in the evening, my phone swinging in my hand and my foot trampling down the farthest flung piece of a dead flower, i cannot see anything but the unfairness of another year in which we won't be far enough, far enough to reach across for reasons that we cannot explain.
i wish he hadn't told me once the last ones had already settled on the ground.
because i hate knowing, now, that we were close enough between trees that i could have yelled and he would have answered, his voice carried also by that wind. but instead i left, and he thought that i was farther away, chasing some dream in a country farther away, when i was left, crying for the last hour of my twenty-first year, thinking of all the years to come; thinking of how i never planned
to be alone for them.
and i am. in my bed, and in his shirt.
he is in my sheets and my pillow -- in his bed,
while my head is against my own, drifting so far away
...
thinking of another summer wedding that i will miss. and a dance
that is his to miss, not mine.
and these are all the thoughts piling up now, like refuse on the side of the road, that were once pretty but are now settling into patterns, same as cigarette butts and other little bits of trash. and as i walk beside that road on the way to my home in the evening, my phone swinging in my hand and my foot trampling down the farthest flung piece of a dead flower, i cannot see anything but the unfairness of another year in which we won't be far enough, far enough to reach across for reasons that we cannot explain.