I write to feel your fingertips on my skin, to breathe in that smell of your conditioner, of faint smoke, of sweat and cologne, and of earth. I write to remember the little pieces of you—the hair that always fell in front of your eyes, the curve of your mouth, the little wrinkle under your eye, and the scar on your forehead.
I write our memories into existence on paper, our bodies twirling and dancing in the foggy, midnight air of a Minneapolis bar. Our kisses exchanged in a car idling outside your apartment front door. I write to bring life to the drunken nights, to the sleepy mornings, to the times I cried and you cried and we fought for something we believed in, wholeheartedly.
But somewhere along the way, we got lost. And so I write to forget.
I write of how you ran your fingers through your hair when you were tired, how you fell into a thick sleep in the late hours of the morning, your back turned from me. How we argued and loved and kissed and pulled away, severing the strings between us as if this was easy, as if we hadn’t sewn the last year of our lives together. As if we didn’t love with everything we had, hadn’t trusted in the impossible against our deepest fears.
I write to remember you. To remember the taste of your lips, the softness of your hands in mind. But I write to forget. To bury these moments, these touches, these memories under layers of pen on paper, of words on a keyboard, of fragments of thought running in circles around my head.
You will always exist in the pages, yet I will forget you.
An impermanent permanence.
A memory, to have and to let go.
Featured Image Credit: Brooke Cagle
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