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I breathe in the cold fall air; it’s crisp and it reminds me of childhood, of innocence and memories that latch onto my soul like parasites. Playground dates and speaking words of love like I know the meaning, words that I thought you’d understand if I only said them enough but you never did. If I close my eyes, my mind will race back to the days of you. Your blonde hair shining in the sun, your cold blue eyes that chill my very existence, and the sweetness of your lips. I can still remember the lies we told, the way we pretended like there was nothing but friendship between us. The nights walking to your house were always my favorite; you in a tank top and pajama pants, your wet hair and the smell of lavender radiating from your body, the feeling of your skin pressed against mine and your hands trailing my body like it’s the last time you’ll ever touch me. I wonder on cold fall days like these, do you get entrapped in memories of me? Tell me was I ever more than green eyes and dimples to you or was I just a hot body to lay next to on a cold night? Or was I something more? Something special that your heart can’t help but cling to? I can never walk these backroads without getting paralyzed by thoughts of you. The wind whispers your name and the sun imitates your touch. Then my eyes flood and I’m lost with no ark, drowning in memories of you. I almost called you the other day, but I’m afraid that you may not be the person I knew. I’m afraid I may not know you at all. Is it foolish to think we could pick up where we left it when we were 15, that we could go back to a time we both outgrew, or am I haunted by a ghost that isn’t even real? We’re taught to live without regrets, but how do I not regret losing you? How do I not regret trying to love you, even if it was never love at all? It’s not that I can’t accept the reality of time, it’s the fact that I’ll never know what we were or what we could have been. It’s the never knowing if you loved me. It’s you never knowing that I loved you. But maybe, just maybe, it’s better this way. I should learn to let you go but I’ve never been good with change. I don’t know how to let go of the thought of you or the plans we made. I’m stuck on the midnight talks of a future, planned by two children. The talks of running away or a version of the world where your father likes the idea of me, a world where we don’t act like strangers in the hallways, a world that looking back at now I know will never come to be. It’s impossible to get back the falls I’ve spent longing for you, the nights I’ve spent staring at the stars trying to remember your voice, the countless women I’ve laid with trying to remember your touch. It’s like my soul only kind of remembers you; like I remember the words but not the sound, I remember your body but not the way it feels. Day by day, I lose sight of your mannerisms. Slowly, I lose a grip on who you were. Every fall you become more of a distant memory and every fall the season comes harder to bear. I wonder when you fell in love with him or when you decided that falls with him gave you more than I ever could. Was it easy reliving every memory with him, the perfect world we wanted with each other existed between you and him? I still remember when I saw you kiss him. The cold Alabama air has never shook my bones as much as it did in that moment. You finally found the perfect guy, the guy your friends and your father approved of, the guy you could show off in the hallways and scream to the world that you were his and he was yours. Still,I came over, obsessed with the thought of you. The way you touched me and the way your body hungered for me to touch you told me that you were never really his. The way you said you loved him but the way you made love to me confirmed every thought in my mind. Still, you claimed to love him more and more each fall and still, I came over. In those days, I don’t know if it was more of you lying to me or just me lying to myself; in reality, we were just lying to each other. Then came the last fall I had with you. It was mid October 2017, and you wanted to have one last party before you graduated early. That night I watched from a distance, as you and him talked about your future, about college, and an apartment and marriage. I wonder if you noticed that with every word and spoken dream you sent me deeper and deeper into madness. No matter how many sips of poison I took, nothing would kill the sound of you slowly drifting away from me. That night when everyone left you held me like the world was ours, like maybe this moment, this small moment of time, could last forever. That was the last night I held you in my arms and the last time we spoke before graduation. Every fall I come back to this small town. My family thinks it’s to visit or take a break from college but the truth is, I come back to remind myself of you. With each visit, memories of you fade like a tattoo, forever there but not as vibrant as when you first pierced your way into my skin and to my heart. Well…that’s the end of my visit. I'll be back next fall.
