You Aren’t Allowed To Come Back After You Leave, It Doesn’t Work Like That
I will not spend another slaughtered night trying to figure out if life is treating you well, or if the sun sets beautifully where you happen to rest your head.
Today as I was scrolling through Facebook, your photo rolled onto my screen.
It danced underneath a bar that suggested I add you as a friend. It hovered in the middle of my page, the “People You May Know” lettering mocking me in a sea of navy and beige.
Perhaps, for us, it should have said, “People You Used To Know.”
Perhaps, for us, it should have said,
“People You Still Think About” or
“People Who Broke You” or
“People Who Walked Away.”
For a moment I reminisced about how long it had been. How we had shared so many secrets between whispered words, how we had made snow angels in our white sheets, how we had sworn with a half-baked hope that we would survive. We scattered the world with memories, letting our hearts stamp our fingerprints into every place we ever felt alive. We were full of wild love, full of reckless life.
And now, we are a mere suggestion. A burned history book with no paper trail. Even the Universe is trying to knot us together again, trying to remind us that we once mattered to eachother. Even the Universe knows that we should have won our war.
We had a different plan for ourselves, it seems. You made a choice to stop the fight, and I will not spend another slaughtered night trying to figure out if life is treating you well, or if the sun sets beautifully where you happen to rest your head. I will close the page, I will lay down my white flag again, and again, and again.
From now on, whenever your photo suddenly appears like an ill-fated attempt to remind me of the boy whose laughter never met his eyes, it will fall below a different list:
“People Who Did Not Deserve To Love You”
“People Who Are Not Allowed To Come Back.”
