I’ve been feeling lately like I should reach out to you. It’s been a quick decade, honestly. I feel the same, yet I barely even remember who I was back then. I scrounged around for hours to dredge up just traces of what should have been years of memories. Like a time capsule- or maybe like a bomb. I must have wiped it all away in the end. I guess that’s what a soul is for, huh? When my brain sometimes has trouble remembering the details, my soul doesn’t let me forget a single. goddamn. thing about the way it all felt. To need you, to be needed by you. We both pulled at each other from the roots, breaking earth and ripping each other apart at the core because we just couldn’t get deep enough. We connected in a way that I have not experienced since, nor do I expect to again.
You loved me. And I believed you.
What that did to me… what it did to both of us…
When it was good, we had annoying little nicknames for each other. Monkey and Tink. Remember the candles? The mix tapes and the earrings? The all night talks and writing binges. The journals of hand-written notes and the little found things we’d give each other… the way you chewed up guitar picks and drank too much Red Bull. That time you practically cut your leg in half, but thought it necessary to send me a picture first instead of just getting your ass to the hospital. The way we absorbed everything about each other like sponges. Until there was nothing left.
I don’t know when we started to turn on each other. I suppose, as tangled up in the other as we were, we forgot to establish the rules. Boundaries were crossed on both sides. So we ended up hurting each other. Badly. Often. In a lot of ways. But worst of all, I think, in how we said we’d never hurt each other, but we did it anyway.
We stopped talking. That was your decision. I know now it was for the best. I probably deserved it at that point. So no one was more surprised than me at the relief I felt under the pain. Like a gangrenous limb you begged the doctor not to amputate until the moment he knocked you out and sawed it off to save your life. I would eventually be better for it. I would have a fighting chance now.
A couple years went by. I found out you were sick. Really sick. But I couldn’t get a hold of you. I didn’t really think you’d want me to anyway. The surgery made you forget things. Made you blind, too. Someone told me that you didn’t recognize my name when they asked you. But maybe that was just a cruel lie to cut me out for good.
Since then you’ve all but disappeared from my perception. You’re a ghost to me now. Our old haunts have been abandoned. “Purged.” Now, I’m the only one left of our little clan. And everything that happened… those years that meant EVERYTHING… defined so much of who I would become… just housed in solitary memory. Our debauched tale is now only as real as any fiction either of us could write. Or less, a schizophrenic dream no one will believe. I feel like I’m crazy. I spent years licking these wounds, and I’m the only one who remembers how I got them. They’ll always think they were just self-inflicted.
I loved you. And you believed me, too.
So which one of us was lying?
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