We sit on the opposite sides of a solid glass wall. I do not see you breathing but rather hear it the way I heard your hands waving goodbye. You haven’t changed. Its been three months and your sly smile still embodies every plan I had for the future except now you are somebody else’s future and I am still struggling to define the word.
You can not hear me from this side of the glass but it doesn’t matter anyway. Every word I’ve ever said to you has already been said. Every word I say to anybody else is a hollowed echo of things I have described to you, highlighted in love.
Although I can not speak, I trace words over the glass. I wanted to give you every poem in the world but words were never enough and no poetry could make somebody like you love me back. But I will give it all to you, here in this moment. My fingers trace the ghosts of words over the slick cold surface. As soon as my hand leaves, the words float up into the air and suffocate the room with all of the metaphors I have tried to give you.
You stare blankly at me etching my loneliness into thin, nonexistent words. And you start to run your fingers over the glass too. You let your emotions spill out in the form of art. You paint canvases of landscapes that you always wanted to see and dreams that you never truly let go. They spill out of you like tears that you once told me you never knew how to spill. I fall in love all over again with the ability you have to paint the future, which I had always found so bleak. In this one moment, my words and your art spin together in a dance that was always too exhausting for you and not enough for me.
Although our fingerprints do not stick, the wall comes alive with all of the nights I had given to you. Moonlight picnics and warm summer days fill my head like a flood that you had pushed me into and I had gladly drowned in. Now, I spend nights pushing back up but the water will never truly let me out. I watch the beach spin out before me with you pulling me in and waves crashing over us. I remember thinking that we were the smallest things on earth, standing before the limitless ocean. We had been brought too each other.
I stop and push my hand to the glass, hoping that you will push your hand to mine. The whole wall will melt and we will fold back into each other. Every night for the last three months were just a countdown to feeling whole again after becoming so broken, but you continue to draw. I stare deeply into you, hoping to find the artist that painted her portrait on my heart. It doesn’t happen. You continue to draw.
I realize now,
that the glass is a one way mirror.
You cannot see me. I am still floating into visions of you that **** up your last words of “I don’t care about you anymore.” I am still the overdramatic poet you had always know me as.
And none of your art was ever for me.