I'm sure you're still awake, even though it is late. You're probably doing your homework or watching TikToks on your phone. Even though I have no way of verifying what you're doing or checking in on you, I still have a strong sense of what you may be up to because I know you very well, and even the iciest of distances between us can't erase all of the things I know about you.
You're just one person who I knew for barely any time at all, and yet you really were everything to me. There's nothing extraordinary about you, but you will always be special to me. Sometimes, I look at old pictures of us, and I wonder how nobody else sees what I saw in you. How you looked over at me from the audience with an unreadable expression on your face, while I stood by myself on that stage, so alone and so desperate, wondering if I reached you. And then you gestured me to come over and I ran into your arms and you pulled me into an embrace, holding me tightly as you cradled my head in your lap.
Holding me, and running a single hand through my hair as I slept on your lap underneath a summer's blue sky, just two kids on a bus somewhere on their way to the middle of nowhere, a museum with a dusty floor that we laid down on side-by-side, a cup of ice-cream in the space between us. I traced the edges of your face and kissed your cheeks, wishing I could freeze you in time, paint a perfect picture of you for me to admire and fall in love with over and over again.
And in another lifetime, I would find you again. I would find you in every single universe, and we would love each other and keep loving each other, and we would stay by each other's sides like we promised, and we would grow old together as the closest of friends, a shared lifetime of memories and stories that would wind our two souls together like the red strings of fate. I would love you as I loved you then, as I still love you now.
I wonder if you still cry yourself to sleep, or if you cry about me sometimes. If you cried, I would hold you, just like I used to. I would caress your hair the way you liked and touch your face in the spots that you liked to be touched and hold you tight and tell you that everything's going to be okay. Even if you're crying about me. Even if you're crying about how much you hate me. I would still find you, and I would still love you, completely, irrevocably, and without regret.
I've seen into your heart, and I once naively thought that I could mend that which has laid broken inside of you for so long. For awhile, I thought I could. For awhile, you let me in. But then you changed your mind, and a piece of your shattered glass heart embedded itself in mine, and now we are forever entangled in the most tragic of ways, two souls hurting as one.
And maybe time will heal our wounds from each other and summer will come again, but by then one, or both of us, will be gone, and all that will remain will be the empty rooms and music halls that will silently bear the memories of the love we shared in those spaces.
I miss you.