"have you lost weight?"

i never know how to give an honest answer regarding this innocently loaded question. most days i feel weightless, floating through the motions.

i've been socially conditioned to take the question as a compliment, but my past eating disturbances only trigger sheer panic, inciting vehement rejections.

maybe i've physically lost weight because food tastes different after your departure. mentally, the weight of your memories bears down on me.

sometimes i feel like atlas; the weight of reality is soul crushing. i feel like i take up too much space: in your office, in your time, and definitely in your inbox, but never in your mind.

i've been starved of your presence for too long, and i'm growing dizzy and weak.

a lot of the time i just don't feel like putting effort into mere existence. i have trouble closing filing cabinets in my brain until i spew out the trivial information that's cluttering my head.

i'm hoping to purge you from my thoughts by this continuous writing of confessionals i'll never send, and maybe i'll finally be weightless.

unrequited love is the **** art of loving someone passionately from a healthy distance. you've perfected this art and made it a brilliant science.

you don't know his favorite colour, although you would guess it to be a little darker than the blue encapsulated by the salty adriatic, a wild blue that mirrors his eyes.

you don't know how he takes his coffee, only that he deteriorates without it, only that he sometimes spills it when he's flustered, leaving the bittersweet scent of a light roast in the air that suffocates you both.

you only know the way his tone changes when he smiles, the vibrato and slight crinkling around his eyes when you make a self deprecating joke or an off handed comment about the morality of a psychological study. you only know the way he pronounces certain words, traumatic, in the way you would say trauma with a long 'a.'

sometimes you will have to remind yourself that he is a part of your lovely science, another experiment upon which you have collected data, a glorious subject to support your hypothesis. a good experimenter never gets involved with the subjects for fear of compromising the study results. you'll always have a tender place for him.

it will be difficult to remind yourself of your place and his, especially during the colder months, especially when he glows while describing a theory or twists language into innuendos, especially when he reassures you that you are competent as a person, but remember your research.

remember to read this on days you find yourself slipping into his familiarity, the familiarity of relationships not meant to be, to be gentle with yourself.