Everything has been a little broken lately:
The screens
The lights
The coffee machine
Me
Other people
The hours...
Well, mostly me.

Everyday,
I used to look forward to you coming by,
and pay for your orders with your reassuring smile.
But, ever since you left,
Ever since you stopped coming by,
Things fell apart.
Nobody smiles anymore,
Nobody wants to be here anymore.
Especially me.
But, I am still here
Waiting,
Waiting to catch up to the past,
that abruptly slipped away from me:
Those days that were truly happy,
because I knew you’d always be there,
Not matter how momentarily.

I shouldn’t have just said that
Your presence makes me happy,
but that
your absence makes me suffer.
That way,
perhaps you'd be happier.

The pieces of my memories of you
Linger against the darkness,
Like a custer of stardust,
that gradually forms a ghost of you
I wish to forget.

Perhaps,
I should just dust you away,
let you chase after some better dreams,
and give into the left over abyss.
Slowly sinking,
drowning,
losing consciousness,
losing all of my false joy and true regrets,
losing all that once were,
or could have been.
Losing almost all of me,
until the slumbering calm finally sweeps over mercifully,
leaving behind only the ghost of me
in its wake.

And then,
Suddenly,
I would realize,
We would finally be the same.

I am holding onto you like an old cloth bound book
A short story just slightly out of time
Brief, nostalgic
Some distant dream I will never get to live.

You swim in my mind like a lost buoy I can no longer reach
Slowly floating away further, and further
Till I can only grasp a momentary glimpse of it,
between the waves of memories.

I regret ever letting it go this far
Ever letting you go.
But even if you stayed,
I knew you were never going to be mine,
As you were anchored to the sea.
While I am just swimming around you,
trying not to drown.

Still,
I tread,
Struggle to stay afloat in the same spot you left me
Not giving into the pull of the abyss
Just in case you were brought back by the turbulence,
the turbulence of time.

I am still chasing the butterfly dream;
I had it in my hands momentarily
all those years ago
When I was just a child
but it flew away, and never came back.
I thought it would visit again
the same time every year,
but one year turned into two,
two years turned into five,
six, nine, ten.
It never came back.

Yet, almost twenty years later,
I am still here,
waiting for a miracle,
Just so I can finally ask it:
“where did you go?
and where did you take
my childlike happiness?”
I had to replace it with this fake laughter
I perfected years ago.

We struggle everyday in this nightmare of living,
only to wake up to another dream after death.