Brevity
It’s wrong, weird to dig my teeth into my lip at a song like some old habit that I don’t remember developing. It’s a song I didn’t even listen to when you left— and yet so many years later, when I’ve stamped it and branded it into memory of another, it’s yours. But isn’t everything about me? It’s all intertwined with you. You wouldn’t feel it. You don’t. But I do. I loathe and adore you and have nothing but a song you will never listen to as comfort.
You as a reader would imagine that to be to a lover, perhaps a friend. Scorned and burning But no- I think of myself, so different and so carefree and young. I imagine she must love me.
I hope she does.
I wonder when I may have lost myself. Or, perhaps, I had truly never known myself.
Surely I must have. From the habitual need to pull on my earlobe to soothe like I have been shown to do as a child on videotape, or from the familiar comfort of curling into a ball with a hand holding my weight beneath the oppression of my stomach.
Such tiny nuances that must mean I know myself. And yet I am lost, praying I make myself proud despite my failing attempts to live a life I hadn't wanted to last.
If only I could hold her, younger me, to assure her she had the brevity to withstand, and the longing to.