Lately I’ve been missing you
In all the strangest of places.

I’ve been finding your memories littered
Across countries that you have never visited,
Tucked in the corners of beds
You’ve never slept in, I have grown accustomed to recognizing you
Inside the faces and bodies of strangers,
Bursting with light that you no longer embody, brimming over
With the heart you once had.

Lately I have been running from silences,
Aching to fill them with chaos, with uncertainty, with anything
That temporarily ceases to infer
The absence of you.

Lately I’ve been flirting with the concept of
Finality –
Of choices that we cannot reverse, of mistakes that we cannot unmake, of
Absolutes
That we can no longer reach out and alter with our meddling, obstinate hands.

I have been learning to lose faith in the concept of
Redemption –
That all we’ve lost will once again be found or that
What’s empty will eventually fill, I have been learning to accept that perhaps sometimes what’s lost is just
Gone

And that you cannot find its equivalent,
Patiently waiting inside one more foreign coffee shop
In one more foreign country,
Resting neatly in the body
Of one more smooth-talking stranger, lined up cleanly
By the sidelines of that dream you never chose.

I have been learning lately, that for some things
There are no equivalents,
That there may never be an equivalent for you.

I have been trying to redeem you
For so many years, trying to carry on the life
That you never got to lead,
Trying to run fast enough and far enough ahead in the hopes that you’ll eventually
catch up

And yet
you never catch up.

Lately I’ve been entertaining the notion that
We can be irreparably broken.

That some of what’s lost cannot be found
that some of what’s done cannot be undone,
that some of what has crumbled cannot ever be fully
reconstructed

And what a goddamned relief it has been

To stop trying to piece these broken parts together,
And to finally just let it stay fragmented

To finally let the brokenness be.