Our Words Are Our Years

It’s always the smallest things, the things that are simple to everyone but you. It’s impossible to remember without smiling, because you always did. You never stopped smiling and it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. But that’s just it, the smallest things, the contradictions and fingertips and words and closeness. I could write enough pages to fill the Grand Canyon, use enough ink to bring back the Colorado River. It’s how you woke me up to see the sunrise, and it hasn’t been nearly as beautiful as when you were here. You always pronounced words as they were spelt in your head, like potpurri, but who could ever figure that out anyway? I miss the way you listened to the words that never stopped spilling from my mouth, and how instead of interrupting you’d simply hold my hands and smile whenever I said something you liked. I always loved the things you said, and I couldn’t understand why you would bother listening to me. I miss your words and your voice and your accent and tone. I miss your fingertips on mine, the way they stuttered over my skin, and I constantly feel them. But I guess it’s easy enough to forget, just scratch out every other word, replace your name with someone I’ve never met, erase everything. We’d make a bestseller, a classic, a story everyone would be jealous of and wish they had, that’s what would happen to all the time I’ve wasted writing about you. We were so fucking beautiful together, we fucked up and cried and stayed out too late and ripped our hands open on fences we shouldn’t have been crossing and got stuck inside rivers in the middle of the night. Everything you were and everything I wasn’t, we were perfect, more perfect than anyone else before us. They said we were Romeo and Juliet, but why the hell would anyone want to be them? No, we were you and me, me and you, repetitive and beautiful and changing. We were everything wrong and everything right and my God we were gorgeous.
You ask me what’s the point of forgetting, because you’re home now and you’re right in front of me, with your hands across my waist and everything my heart had forgotten is coming back in waves. My heart had forgotten and stopped beating its frantic pattern but now it’s all back and you’re back and we can be beautiful again. Just come a little closer. It’s been too long and I need you so much closer.