"I think about you sometimes. I don’t think you realized how many pieces of you are left here for me to desperately try to avoid. I think about you and the way you were a part of me that I never openly admitted to you. We’d say it in these coded verses, in the quiet corners that our kind has always been native to.
I sometimes think you thought that maybe you were an exception to our own rule. That maybe you thought I’d hold on, maybe you thought I’d try my hardest to make sure you knew we were still something, that you were still alive here. You are still alive here. but you’re gone. And sometimes I remember that you’ve been gone for a long time. That maybe you were gone before you even really left.
I showed you a lot of parts of me. These fevered and star-crossed parts that I kept reserved for the kinds of people who maybe didn’t need to be told about them. The kinds of people who would see them and say “i know.” The quiet ones, the careful ones, the kind that crept across from corner to corner finding things that no one else would ever notice and holding them closer and closer until they burned through whatever logic said that none of this would ever bring you any further from what you were running from. And we were always running. I sometimes think you thought that you showed me parts of you too. But I had to pull them out of you. I had to persuade your secrets to not blow me off the way they always wanted to. I had to, not because I thought I had a right to, but because maybe I wanted a very strange and very buried part of you to half-belong to me. I'm not ashamed. I am not so detached, I am not so cold.
I loved you in the dark the same way I loved you in the light. And there were times when I wasn’t sure if I could say the same for you. But I loved you regardless. And it was never yours, it was always mine. I know this now because it did not depend on you. It had nothing to do with whether you could reciprocate the feeling. I wasn’t looking for mutual interests. I wasn’t looking for anything. I just loved you, not because I had to or felt compelled to, but because I found you and I saw you and sometimes, in the right moments, you found me too.
Now the leaves are turning yellow like they always do in November, and I’m having a hard time here. They always tell you that sometimes the things you love will disappear, disintegrate in the middle of a single moment. What they don’t say is that when they finally go they accidentally leave ghosts. And I’m afraid of ghosts. They all seem to know me too well"
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