I watched The Sound of Music today, and it induced such a strong nostalgia that led to my thinking of you. It’s no surprise that this species of feeling is so tightly connected to you. I accept that it is and likely will be for some time.

Yet if you were here now, sitting across from me in bed, I don’t know what I’d have to say. Nothing out of the ordinary perhaps, I’d ask how you’ve been, if you feel your life is better or worse than when we were together.

Like a runaway fume rising from the dying carcass of an angel, you’ll say ‘better’, I think. Then, cold and hungry I’ll say, “I’m happy for you”. I’d pause, wearing two long sleeves thinking of what to say next and eventually get to it…

You fought so hard at the end believing we still had a chance, but I think if you knew everything I’d think and do, just to get by you, you wouldn’t have said what you did. You could only admit to a fracture of how bad things had gotten.

We committed unforgivable acts by enduring the intolerable. And while there’s a part of me that considers ‘what if’. What if we laid everything bare, could we have still made it? I don’t think, now or then, that it was worth figuring out. 

I’ve learned that there’s no ‘best life’ simply the life chosen or the unchosen life-lived. The best chance, a chance taken. So while I have been so deep in thought of you, I remind myself that we, thankfully, never really put chips down.

Though we took authorship of our individual lives, when the pages were filled and lay on the bed, the story hadn’t come out the way we planned. Not only that, but we had pushed the narrative to a precipice. An ellipsis that held a question.

What next? 

Looking back at our story I found that it was filled with an obvious conservatism in how much we committed to one another. Like I knew that these chapters were a preamble for something better to come. An old testament promise.

So imagining you sitting in that swivel seat in the corner. Hair naturally curled, half in a pony tail. Your S&S jacket, blue tight jeans and pointed, cheap, fake-leather boots. Annoyed as shit, half there, eyes stuck half rolled. Hand to head.

I say ‘goodnight’ to that ghost of you.