No Other

You have been missing from me for ninety-three days. I know this because I counted every one – I counted every hour that I could not run my fingertips over your eyelashes, that I could not trace the curve of your shoulder blades. When you have loved someone so wholeheartedly for so long, they become as familiar to you as your own palm-lines. I can’t remember how to be without you, who I am – I am living my life in half-reactions, like I can’t quite remember how to complete an emotion. Every path and cord in my body has been severed; the winding lanes of my brain that always brought me back to you are shaded and blocked.

Today I am aware that the window is open, and the breeze drifting through the sill is too cold for my bare legs. Just like yesterday, I want it to be tomorrow right now. How did I ever fill these hours? What ever made me go outside? I’m sure that by now, I should be finding my feet. If my heart is on a rollercoaster, it has been free falling for far too long – I want it to even out now, I am ready. Why won’t you let it?

Every time I think I have forgotten the exact timbre of your voice, the creases around your eyes, the feel of your skin, I find them again in something else – the sound of a vacuum cleaner, the cracks in the footpath, sand at low tide. I still search for you in crowds. I still hear you in the kitchen, I still smell you on the towels when I dry my face. I still see your face behind my closed eyelids. I still reach an arm out for you on lazy Sunday mornings and hope to find you layered under goose down and sunshine.

I am only feeling empty air.

My sweet boy you are everywhere, I run to you in every moment, you are in every breath and every ray of sun, you are the parting clouds and the driving rain, you are unsettled dust and refracted diamonds, you are my torment and my salvation. I run to you across empty streets, across streams and train-lines, I run to you over and over again, in familiar poems and sunlit grass, I run to you over and over and over, I