Time is stopped and there is a heart on pause pressed into my shoulder. Like a boulder drawing breaths, his lips are on my neck and his hands are in my pocket. A heart shaped locket takes his place as his plane flies and my heart flutters then lies still like time is paused. All I can do is heave into the hollowed porcelain as my heart clanks like hail against the window of my ribs and I want to drive but the storm is too heavy, like it’s winter and I won’t make it home for Christmas in this blizzard.
I draw his face into the stark white canvas with my brush and it may not match the picture, but it matches my memory as my hand stands still and I want to kiss the still-wet green of his eyes. Each step I take is heavy, like the gravity on saturn has taken me over and it feels like I’m walking without time, as his laugh does not echo the halls. Deserted walls and glass coated floors, fallen pictures from slammed doors, swept to the side with unfeelingly cut feet. Isn’t it neat to be numb to most everything and most everyone?
Friends all pretend saying how I feel should be the song I sing to let the halls ring and fill the silences of my hell. They know all too well they are just acting silly, trying to prevent my grey sorrows from clouding my home the way it will. And it will, whether they interrupt my clouds with their poorly painted rainbows or not. Bared feet trip and a heart beat skips repeatedly against the hard wood floor that is pressed against a face that feels like mine. I know the news before they come; I’m not dumb. Yet it is hard to pretend to such prestigious people that everything in this house is fine.
Men as tall as skyscrapers, dressed as sharply as a new pair of scissors, clip the tips of my fingers to ice cold shreds with a typed out letter and a whispered apology. Like any sorry is going to take my broken heart and tie all of the dead pieces together. Life is paused as I remember the tear that swam in his eyes but didn’t fall. The tear that glided back into his ducts and didn’t survive to prove he’d yearn for me in the lengthening midnights. As though he would have rather been more man than lover and our good bye could be easily cut short. His letters were tear stained and curt, stopped short and sweet so many months ago that I knew then, what I definitely know now, in my heart.
I can’t stop the slam of the door, the noise that falls before it hits my ears as men shocked with the electricity of my energy leap about an inch off the cemented porch. My heart pounds and I can feel myself chasing a target unknown that just grows in my mind’s eyes. I feel as though my friends are spies and if I don’t move fast enough, they’ll destroy my plans and convince me that anything besides what my hammering heart wants will be more valuable. As if there are canons going off, my feet race across the hard wood floors and I know one thing.
I miss him.
But I’ll see him soon.