Spaces.

It is always the spaces where I find myself looking for you. Sometimes I wait and hold my breath counting to ten so you can appear. Sometimes you do, in a blue t-shirt and faded jeans. My mother told me to keep away from men in faded jeans, they are ‘trouble,’ but you said, I am a storm that you never see coming.

I pick you up, fling you high into the air and watch you crash.

Music.

I hear our song everywhere and radio stations love it more than we did. They play it every hour. I cannot listen anymore.

Faces.

I see you every day and the temptation to walk with my eyes closed is growing on me like my second skin. You are in our friends, their friends and in my mutual friends- and their comments and status updates like the disorder everyone is affected by but cannot speak of. They all look like you.

Thoughts.

This is the only place that is mine. You cannot come here because I cannot let you in. One foot in the door and you’d move in.

‘Listen, it’s not what you think.’

‘Let me explain.’

‘Would you hear me out?’

‘So, it’s like that, uh?’

Spaces. Music. Faces. Thoughts…bits and pieces of things we took for granted and there I was sitting on the living room floor as she told me about you. Every tear inflicting a wound on me, but when you cannot take away someone’s pain by your presence, you can always find comfort in words. It is like having a smoke. It amazes me how a smoker knows another smoker, you see them walk up to another and lean in to light their cigarettes! Smokers can also share spit without complaining. You puff and pass on to your fellow smoker and they puff and give it back. Spit.

A touch of the lips. Intimate.

There are things we took for granted my love, like the woman you were leaving me for who still loves you.