lowell

It has been over a year since I wrote anything here. It’s probably been that long since I wrote anything in general. I don’t know when I stopped, not just writing but feeling the way I used to. Maybe it was the pandemic, because the words are starting to come back to me in small lines and melodies. They slip between the blocks of occupied time in my day, repeating themselves like a beating drum. There’s a thought that keeps tugging at my conscious. In the back of my mind, always, that I wish you were here. Another era ending, another time leaving, and I only get further and further from the colby and the winter and the back roads. And I know it’s healthy, I feel how much easier I breathe these days. How much more whole and safe and comforted I feel within my own body, with my identities. But the further I get from the dark places of the past the further I get from you. And I hate that. I’m sitting outside my favorite cafe at college, a place I took Izze and my mom and a place I will never get to show you. I contemplated ditching class for so long today, and I miss when I felt compelled to do things not by logic but by emotion. When we would just go because it was high school and who gave a shit and the world was outside of those walls not within them. Now the world is beyond and within here, but you are back there and I spend thirty minutes trying to make an inconsequential decision that has no effect on the future. I miss just going. Just doing. That was how the world was when we were sixteen. And now I think first. Think hard. Think too much. I overthink overthinking, and I’ve gone from being dangerously reckless to dangerously calm. And I feel like that has to do with losing you. Because I swear it’s not just growing up. I drift towards and away from your spirit and I am so afraid of the dark because I know I couldn’t survive it again. I don’t know how we ever found the strength to survive that place because now I feel like the slightest cut would crumble me. So I stay calm. I stay away from everything that could hurt, even the things that are exciting and liberating and the other night I climbed out of my girlfriend’s car window, the way we used to when you first got your license. Six februaries apart, I felt so alive in that icy air hanging out of the red colby and the other night I was smacked with a brief fear that I would tumble out of that window and die. Is this what aging is? Forgetting that the we once held time so tightly seconds were hours, that we once held the world so close our blood was the snow and the dirt and the sky. I found old letters I wrote you in a notebook I decided to use for class and I feel like I speak a different language than I used to. My words now are so forced, so chosen and thought-through and I miss the way poetry used to flow from me like water from a riverhead, the way words used to dance aimlessly through my mind no matter the time and there were always footprints of feelings I wished to express waiting to catch my tongue at the right time and I have never been as quiet as I am now. As quiet, wanting so desperately to be loud again. I feel like I am in the halfway place, in the reversal of the world we built together, at the exact midpoint on my way back full circle. I wonder what happened in all the other places, in every other lifetime where you didn’t die and we left that place together. Would sanity feel less like a forgery, if I was sitting on this patio listening to lowell with you.