Everything I Would Have Said To You, But Couldn’t

I remember the first time we met like it was yesterday. You slipped in late on the first day of that ethics class we both regretted taking, and asked with a rather silent whisper whether the seat next to me was available, as if you thought no one would realize you lacked punctuality as a daily trait. Hastily, but quietly, I had to ask you the repeat what you said, as if then I had already wanted to help you from being stared down by a number of cold eyes in the classroom angry at yours for distracting a few seconds of their higher learning. Finally I understood what you said and nodded, and from that day I had a frequently tardy seat mate and though I didn’t know it right then, I had a partner in crime.

What you did not know was that I was a freshman and that ethics class was out of my program or intended major, I was contemplating dropping out and taking up something one would deem useful, like computer sciences, but the fact that you embraced my friendship in that class alone made me want to stay, a young girl that wasn’t used to having someone she could call both a union of a classmate and an actual friend. But if there was one thing I could wish for I would wish that I could remember the last time we met, because if I could I would not have to stay up every night praying for the Gods to provide me the closure I needed, to protect my mind from the demons that raged and bubbled fiery and terrible thoughts every time the clock struck past night.

I wish you existed now in reality more than ever, rather than solely in my mind, an ultimate curse I am bound to suffer for the rest of the entirety of my life. I wish I loved you better as a friend and as a soulmate, I wish I had told you everyday how much I was surprised to have found someone so compatible and wonderful as yourself. I wish I could whisper everything I was thinking and feeling and keeping bottled into the soil ground through the mahogany wood you were encased in into your bones and your decaying flesh and have you hear me, to tell you that I did love you, I was only waiting for you to come home and take me out to dinner and when we sat at the beach staring at the stars on our backs I would lean over and say it, and you would smile and say it back and we would admire just how beautiful the stars in the sky had become just over a simple phrase we had finally grown the courage to say.

Oh, how I wish the clocks could turn so I could tell you that I had been attending those cooking classes in secret so that I could surprise you when you came home, trooping in your camouflage uniform and those boots they make you wear in the trenches that you insisted on keeping to remember the experience.

It has been eight years and I still sit alone sometimes looking out of the window at the blue sky remembering the day you came home with your eyes lit like the candles on your twenty third birthday cake, and when you blew out the candles you announced to the whole gaggle of friends and family that you were grateful for the surprise party that was thrown for you but you were more grateful for your country and the land you lived in, and how you had grown the courage to want to join the army that protected and served your home.

I still remembered that same night when it was just us two left in a bed with clean white sheets, you holding my little hand and telling me how nervous you were that no one would understand the decision you had made. Would I wait for you? You had asked me. I never gave you an answer. But now as I look out the window at the clouds and the sea blue sky I can almost see you smiling down at me via the brightness of the sun rays and the beautiful shape shifts of the clouds, in your heavenly mansion where I’m sure so many of those like you are honored up above. And I smile back as I lace my fingers around the one necklace you had given me a year after we met, the only gift you had ever given me, the only thing that I treasured and will treasure for the longest time to come.

I would look up at the sky and say, I would wait for you forever, and my thoughts would be interrupted by a little hand pulling my long and frail fingers, a mess of a ponytail and big blue eyes like yours staring back at me and asking what’s for dinner. Her name is Talula and she is yours. And as if routine she would sit on my lap and ask what I was waiting forever for, and before I could answer she would flash the smile you used to give me, almost an exact replica, and she would say, I’ll wait for forever too.