On The Nights I Lay Awake, I Wonder If You Miss Me Too

On the nights I lay awake, staring at a ceiling that looks like yours, I wonder if you’re looking down on me from up there. I hear the last words you said to me. They haunt me like how lonely the night can be.

It’s been 2 years, and I still haven’t really talked to anyone about how I feel, or how I felt when you decided to selfishly leave everyone: your family, your friends, your loved ones. Maybe I can’t talk to anyone about you because the only person I want to talk to you about, is you.

So, on the nights I lay awake, like tonight, I’ll write an angry letter to you, one I wish you would be able to read even though you’re far far away, farther than the proximity of a computer screen away from me. Can you see them? Do you read them?

My folder, titled “Angry letters” is getting pretty full. I’ve kept it all to myself, as if you’re my own little treasure, so valuable and rare that it could be just mine. The rest of our friends have erased your shallow breaths along with your husky voice as time has passed, but I’m not like them.

On the nights I lay awake, your words echo as if I’m hearing them for the first time again.

It all comes back, in florescent flashes like how you used to flick your lighter to show me how to burn and I burned with you.

The first night without you, I slept beside the bathroom toilet. Can’t you see? It wasn’t because I was drunk or ill, it was from the very thought of a world without you. It made me sick.

On the second night, I slept because I couldn’t stay awake thinking back to things I wish I could have done. After a week, it was as if time was slowly erasing your name from my Facebook feed and text messages. And after a month, I wondered if what really happened because we never took a picture together. It was like we never existed. Like you never existed. But I know you did.

You come and go in my mind as you please, and somehow, even when you’re gone, you still have a powerful effect on me.

You remind me how much I regretted not telling you how I really felt about you. That I did not go to your funeral because I couldn’t let our last memory together be in some musky, dark, and empty church. That every time you told me about your frustrations with her, you were only deepening my own regrets towards you.

That you weren’t just a brother to me. You never could be.

That I used your hugs as a way to be closer to your heart, your fragile and golden heart.

On the nights I lay awake, I try to talk to you, to tell you that what I really felt, was love.