I remembered thinking for what must have been the thousandth and final time that I was finally over it. Not even him, just it- every emotion and every bad and good thing that was contained in our one tiny universe. But I must have been lying to myself because the moment that Taylor Swift song came on, it all came back to me. The floodgates that I had carefully guarded for months had been swept open by a tidal wave of feeling and the memories surged through me, drowning any modicum of logic and control that I had:
That day, waiting out in the rain for you to show up. I was walking around with bated breath and my heart was thumping against my ribcage, like a stray bullet ricocheting madly. Those hours are carved in my memory to the point that I think the receptors in my skin had that day's temperature eternalised and set as my body's freezing point. Because whenever I think back to it, my whole body goes numb, almost as if your flippancy had immobilised me all the way forwards in time. You never came but it was okay because out in the pouring rain, I still pictured your face with perfect clarity. I finally asked around, only to find out that you had already left. I think a part of me disappeared along with you that day, leaving me raw and always returning to that point in time to seek out what it was exactly, but never finding it.
And that was just the first. Everything else that occured in between are rooted in our timeline so firmly, I can't erase any of it from my mind. I recall the way you stopped to talk to those girls, and how could you claim that there was nothing more to it when you wouldn't even look me in the eyes? You carried a conversation with them the same way I carried a torch for you even though the flame ate through the holder and burned my skin. The inextinguishable fire that you set, I can still feel the flames wrapping around me and dragging me in after all this time, the smoke slowly suffocating the air in my lungs and turning everything around me hazy. Third degree burns from your insouciance.
That first and only time I ever felt your hands against mine. I think everything before felt like I was driving through the night with only a pair of headlights to guide me through the dark and suddenly, the stars and the moon turned on. It was like a dream but it was also so real because everything everyone had ever said about fingers brushing was a lie. All those things about sparks flying or bursts of electricity, they're all fiction. Nothing compared to the realness of your fingers casually meeting mine, even if it was just for a fraction of a second, and then gone like I had imagined the whole thing.
The last time I saw you was the day you broke my heart beyond repair. It's funny because I never even saw it coming. That whole year, I had guessed at the truth and that day, I realised I came pretty close to it. All I wanted was to share my good news with you, and then I saw that you had your own good news, it just wasn't the kind you would have ever shared with me. Time stopped forever on that day. I would know. Because if you're able to play a certain day in your head over and over but you find that you can't rewrite it, that's not history. That's all the clocks in the world malfunctioning,
trapping you in a kind of suspended animation that can't be broken. You're stuck and it's not like a math question, you can't solve your way out. It's an emotional plight- you have to feel your way out. I've been trying to feel my way out ever since. Now that it's been a year and a half, I find myself oscillating between the two parallel lines of being over it and being not okay, but sometimes I see someone and I think that maybe they could be the one to bring me back to life.
