i still have those pictures from your disposable camera you gave me five years ago when my hair was still long, when we were still in love. i don't look at them anymore. and to be honest, i don't even know where they are or when i looked at them last but i find comfort in knowing they are taking up some space, somewhere, in this disorganized room of mine.
i still have your name carved into the top of my ceiling which is funny because you were always the one so quick to define the meaning of impermanence. i guess all ceilings eventually collapse. i think i clung too tightly to the possibility of you never leaving, and so i carved your name into my ceiling to comfort myself during all the noise that not even your name could silence. i don't look at it anymore. and even though you're gone, there are some people who leave traces of themselves behind in the most obscure places that not even they become aware of.
i still have all of the love letters you wrote me when i was sixteen. they are sitting in a box beneath a pile of books and papers on the bottom of my bookshelf. i don't read them anymore. i contemplated burning them more than once, but i stopped myself because what's the point in loving someone if you can't even prove thatΒ the love was actually there after everything has been said and done, after all of it has left you? i get so terrified, to think that perhaps memory is more unreliable than anything, and so i keep the things you gave me as secret stash to show that we happened once.
sometimes i wonder what it would have been like to have given you the chance to explain yourself face to face i will probably never know what it feels like to land on the moon but that does not stop me from gazing at it night after night paralyzed with wondering how anything could ever be that beautiful. somethings should be left unseen while others, simply left unknown.