I wake with my shirt cold and wet, stuck to my chest with the memories I relive instead of forget.
The nights that we danced and laughed that we were the luckiest. To sit with Monet and listen to strings in the cathedral on des Champs D’Élysées. A loft party turned tiny concert on a platform bed. We climbed into the earth to float in a cave and you held me and told me there’d be no one else, again,
Now I’m high,
All the time.
‘Cause I left you more than I wanted to and it doesn’t end
when I wake with my shirt cold and wet,
stuck to my chest,
as you are now, and will be again.
I relive because we can’t be living, live together now but there you are stuck to my chest again and again.
It's like a death. I burned the few things I had left of my ex and put the ashes and my ring in an old copper container that came with a perfume bottle inside from the 90s, when we met. And I pretend it's him and sometimes I cry and tell the ashes I miss him. And the person I text with about the kids is someone else entirely.
Sometimes the grief over what never came to pass is worse than grief over the things that did. I’m right there with you.