Requiem

The fire you lit in me

Grows colder in your absence

I swear I’m better off now, but there’s that part in me that feels suffocated in silence. Your silence. Your is an empty pronoun that could easily be their, because half the time I don’t know who you are except that you’re gone and I feel empty. Where once something flowed, it’s a dried up culvert where all that was once became isn’t so. And I just have to deal with that except I don’t deal with it well. And well is an empty adverb that could just as easily be left out. I don’t deal with it. I stuff it to the back of my mind, a mind that’s like a junk drawer of yesterday’s. Stuffed to the brim of shit no one will ever need but we must hold on to it nonetheless. There you sit like my grandmother’s old phone number, and a coupon for free fries. Except every time I stumble across you in my quest for anything of use, I stab myself in the finger with an ouch that sounds more like why. And I tell myself there is no why, but that answers my question like please stop screaming quiets a toddler.

I just want what was, where something made sense even though it was nothing. It was nothing and it became everything. And I keep rummaging around hoping to find it, like I’ve lost my marbles and if I could just find one shred of something that made sense. A flicker. A glimmer. An old match to make a new spark and the ember that was could be a bonfire of what will be.

I’m tired of being cold. This empty grey is a void I’d sooner paint with rainbows but I’m much too tired to lift the brush. Because I spent all day thinking how I couldn’t, and how if I could pull a Cher, I’d make us less of a vague pronoun and more of the nothing that became everything.

It’s easier to blame the past then accept the present. You’ve become a thought and nothing more. And that haunts me most.