You Were Mine and Then …

The feeling first occurs to me when I wake up. Somewhere in my unconsciousness, I’d seen your face. You’d been looking at me, and I’d sensed some sort of warmth. A happiness. Your eyes are always the last thing to fade. They’re faintly there staring at me when the morning light first fills my span of vision and everything registers. I get an infinitely vague sensation like you’d been holding me — one arm around my waist and the other up my back. Maybe at one point, you’d held me close enough that your breath rushed down my neck amid the slow, automated motion of your chest rising and falling. I can trace the very thread of memories as if I’d lived them until it all unravels in an instant.

It’s the word you’re dying to say, but it just can’t roll off the tongue. It’s the sweetest smell picked up in the wind. It’s the Polaroid shot of a perfect life that never quite developed.

You were mine, and then you weren’t.

The feeling continues when I draw my first conscious breath. Your eyes are cerulean, and they haunt me. I can remember how your eyebrows furrow around them when you get angry, or the way those triangular creases remain at their corners for several moments after you laugh. They widen and flare when you get enraged, or ironically, exuberant.  And they gloss over when you lower them in the moments of hurt you wish were private. I can see it all.  As I sit up in bed and lower my feet to the floor. As I momentarily scrunch the carpet between my toes. As I stand up, walk through the room, and step into the shower. Until the water hammers down and wakes me up. It’s the playground I ran away to as a kid that was demolished. It’s the night I spent in jail. It’s my stolen wallet. It’s where I’m delusional and your face disappears each morning.

You were mine, and then you never were.

The feeling envelops me when I sink into my routine Facebook peruse, cupping a bowl of Special K in my lap, before I drop my spoon. Milk splatters. And a sharp pain gathers in the pit of my stomach, shooting up underneath my ribs and puncturing my lungs. I never realized my chest could leak. But it does like it ran over a nail on the expressway — that wheel I keep riding clueless of its imminent burst. Because suddenly your statuses appear as I scroll through my news feed. The meal you cooked together. Your matching Halloween costumes. A quip about the three little words you told her. A victim of my own sickness, I keep clicking through — picture after picture, status after status.

You were mine, and then you were hers. You were really hers.

I let myself drown in the feeling all day long, only gasping for air in the minutes I double-check our recent Facebook chats and text messages to search for hints of your feelings for me. Word definitions become less about literal meanings and more about imagined hidden intent. Like what’s the reference of time when you say, “I’ll talk to you soon”? I tell myself that I never really knew you, that the moments I remember as pure sincerity and genuine chemistry are grains of sand cased in a house of straw. Still, I didn’t know the human mouth had so many molars until you laughed in front of me. Because when you laugh, you commit, throwing your whole head back. Then there are those long busied strides you take when you walk like you really mean it when you get up to go to the restroom. And the definitive motion your hands make when you talk. They might as well be the quirks of a stranger. Everything I think I know about you could’ve come from a movie or lyrics Conor Oberst wrote. It’s the word you’re dying to say that never existed. It’s the smell that stunk when the wind never blew. It’s that faulty Polaroid I just can’t stop shaking.

You were mine, and then you were nothing at all.