For all of the months we spent together, I thought of you in neatly organized sentences. “I love you.” Always with a period, because that’s how you know someone really means it. The first word of every sentence about you was capitalized, because you weren’t some sloppy diary entry splattered on an old composition notebook page. You were a carefully crafted novel, bound by alternative rock bands and chinese buffets. You were different, and you could not have possibly been summed up in a measly three paragraph essay, like the one I wrote about Abraham Lincoln in the fifth grade. Every comma was the pause I had to take when I saw you, because I swear each day you continued to take my breath away. And with you, there were no misspellings, there were no grammatical errors. You had flaws, but they were so deeply hidden in between the lines that I didn’t even bother looking for them. I guess that’s why I didn’t notice when I became less and less of a priority. And when the “goodmorning” texts came to an end, that should have been a red flag. Your copy of How to Treat Someone You Love would be similar to a guide on how to take care of a goldfish. “Feed twice a day and change water once a week”. It’s really that simple for you, because you have the mind of an engineer. Logical. Precise. There is no such thing as passion and forgiveness, just empty “I love you”’s. Because you once told me that we are just in high school. You never really explained what that meant, but I got the hint. So I left.
Because if there’s one thing I realized, it’s that you cannot make someone love you. You cannot make them care, and you cannot make them stay. And it’s one of the hardest things to do, but once you realize it, you get this new sense of… freedom. Not the feeling you get after the last bell on the last day of school, not that. But more like you see the world for all it’s worth, for the first time. Because it feels good to let go of the idea that you need closure. People don’t need closure, they need to turn around and walk away. They need to not put up with the people who wouldn’t put up with them. I don’t need closure on why we ended, I don’t need to know why you never took me back. You made your decisions, and now it’s my turn to make mine. Because if it were meant to be, my birthday would not have passed with nothing more than a text saying “hbd”. Hbd. I guess that’s who you’ve become. Your novel-like qualities have become nothing more than text lingo in the inbox of a teen girl. I swear I use to look at you like you were a poem written by e.e. cummings, but now you’re nothing more than a piece of scrap paper under my bed. And it’s sad because although I don’t know much about love, I knew enough to make you see the world in shades other than black and white like you’ve been raised to see.
And thinking back on what we had, I see it as an art collection. But it wasn’t structured around the basic principles of primary colors and symmetry. It had life and depth and meaning. Things I could never get you to understand. But now I realize it wasn’t because we had it all wrong, it’s because we try to make it too right. But art isn’t right, it isn’t pretty. It’s brutal and honest, but it makes you feel things that engineers can’t. And I guess that’s what a poet gets for messing around with numbers and figures. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’ve exhausted every word and every sentence that could possibly be used to talk about you. I paid you the highest form of flattery, I made you into my art piece. I made you dance across the page, and brought what we had to life, because in reality it was dead. I tried to salvage us, but now I’m happy with letting my idea of you go. Because it’s not closure that I need, it’s distance. Especially distance on paper. So as this course comes to end, so does my time spent on you. Some people are better off wrapped up in the laws and theorems, because not even words can make them beautiful.
