You’re Not The You I’ve Been Missing

Today I realized you’re not the you I’ve been missing.

I miss him. The guy who laughed with me under pine trees. The one I could talk to for hours mindlessly, getting lost in random conversation. The world stopped spinning when I was with him. Everything else didn’t matter. It was just him and I beneath the trees falling in love.

But you’re not you anymore.

I’m pacing everyday for a way to stop needing him because he doesn’t exist anymore. But that emptiness inside me that desperately seeks him never gets filled. I can try to replace it with something else or mask it. I can move half way across the country to try and forget he exist, but it doesn’t work. Because it’s not in the distance it’s in the memories.

That’s where I see him and feel him. It’s my old playlist. It’s driving down Highway 1 listening to Florence and The Machine. It’s blue cheese, steak, and cranberry over a bed of lettuce drizzled in balsamic. It’s the mom and pop meat shops I find in random places with amazing cuts of meats. It’s trying new recipes. It’s a flower decorated porch with a bistro set. It’s grey striped sheets and the continuing argument of decor: comfort or fashion? It’s decorative hand towels in the kitchen vs. dish towels.

It’s everything that reminds me of him. It’s all the memories that make up us. Not the ones about him or the ones about me. It’s the things we did together, saw together, tried together, experienced together. Him and I. Memories are the only thing that make him up anymore. I see him all around me. I crave a new experience with him but it’s not possible. Even talking to you doesn’t help.

Because you’re not you anymore.

I’m trying to fill the void of him I so desperately seek. That empty feeling. It hurts and I can feel it in the deepest part of my core. It’s there and it needs me, it reminds me everyday, in everything I see. But there is no filling it.

Because you’re not you anymore.

It’s an addiction, a craving. Like the first high that can never be filled because time changes things. Because any new experience that involves us now, won’t be like the us then. The us now has too much of a past, too much pain and too many scars. Too much betrayal. My addiction cannot be fed by who you are now.

Because you’re not you anymore, and you never will be.