Temporary

I knew you were temporary. I knew our love was tethered to the summer wind, bound to be lost to the ocean and an ever growing number of days, years. With each kiss, I counted the minutes left, trying to grasp on to the last moments of your subtle accent, the last seconds of your smile.

I begged myself not to love you. Tried to will the veins of my heart to resist the very feeling they had been built for. I knew it would only make the inevitable harder. What if it didn’t have to be temporary? But I was too afraid to tell you I would relocate my future just to be able to run my fingers through your hair again.

I wrote down every conversation. Every moment. I wrote how your glasses rested on the curve of your nose, how your hand danced on my neck when we kissed, how you kept two earrings pinned to the inside of your hat, for just in case. I didn't want to miss any detail. I didn't want to forget anything. As if maybe, when our souls had drifted an ocean apart, I could still have you, if only in my memory.

I would never tell you that I loved you–that I still loved you.

As summer subsided to snow, I spent my nights fighting off the memory of your warm breath on my neck, begging my brain to come up with anything, anything else to fall asleep to. Some nights I would indulge my delusion, let myself draft how we would meet again in some future I wanted desperately to believe in. On the worst nights, when the silence of suburbia gave my thoughts the microphone I tried so hard to silence, I would replay the three seconds you'd sent me once upon what now seemed like a dream. "Ehm, goodnight, sleep tight," it would sing through my phone speaker.

Your eyes faded from my memory and I tried to let myself lose you. I tried to relinquish the fantasies of some far off day when you would gently tuck my curls behind my ears again, wish me goodnight in your accented English. I tried my hardest to stop looking for you in every brunette I saw on the streets. I tried, oh God I tried, to admit that it was only temporary.

--

It was a warm April evening when I saw you again. It is over, I wrote on a napkin as I prepared myself with a cappuccino. It is over, I repeated as I snaked through the foreign streets to your apartment. It is over, I tried to will my heart to, finally, close.

But standing there, in an open flannel, I couldn't help but hope for some fantastical forever.

And like the dream I had drafted so many times, your heart was still open, too.

The ocean cannot take you away from me.