i wonder if you know why we stopped speaking. take a guess. try to pinpoint it with the
eyes that could always read me so well.
(you won’t. you said you’d never been good at ‘that game’.)
think about when it was that we last saw each other. do you remember?
it was august, i think, or july – sometime during the middle mess of this past year.
(of course, it’s been over a year now. do you still live the illusion of safety?)
anyway, it was summer, and you thought it should be over – the distancing. the masks.
i used to bind my opinions to yours, bending to fit your worldview.
(driving you to the golf course that day, i tried to. i couldn’t.)
i should have realized how fundamentally different our worldviews were
the moment you told me you were majoring in economics.
(it is a shame that someone so intelligent would throw themself upon the stock market pyre.)
my drive to be a good person is intrinsic, irreversible, but i used to audibly downplay it in an attempt to gain your approval.
you thought caring for the world was egocentric.
(i say ‘thought’ instead of ‘think’ because i don’t know you anymore, and i refuse to make assumptions about strangers. i doubt you’ve changed, but i won’t say you haven’t.)
am i twisting your words through the warped funhouse mirror of memory? perhaps.
but, i remember realizing how little you recognized about the privilege which allows your ignorance. i remember wondering, ‘is this connection worth losing myself?’
(it wasn’t. not to me, at least. that doesn’t mean the loss didn’t – doesn’t – ache.)
anyway, . . . anyway. any way i write around it comes back down to this:
i will not remain close with those who care about nobody but their own small circles of loved ones.
(‘sweet’ as you may be, you are one of that ‘those’. after the last afternoon we spent together, i could no longer deny that.)
i have slowly snipped away at the length of rope which binds us together.
i have watched fibers fall piece by piece to the ground in tandem with my own tears.
(i will no longer reverse the process by taking a needle and thread to rejoin our diverging lives. maybe, one day, i'll finally sever the last link – the pretense of continued friendship.)
once upon a time, i realized our story had never been a fairytale.
once upon a time, i drove home on the 57 and decided to never look back.
(i like to think you’ll open your eyes someday. i won’t be there to see it.)
- v & co
( you never scratched the surface of the other selves within this shell of a body you memorized. )
