Finding The Closure I Never Knew I Needed

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Never in a million years would I have expected us to be here again. Sitting in front of each other, nothing but moonlight, a breeze in the air. In the beginning, words stuck in my throat, I stared at you in awe. I had forgotten your face, your lips, your hair, your voice. Or so I had thought. Five minutes later and it was instantly back, like muscle memory, and I couldn’t tell if I was happy or sad.

I felt then more than ever how weird love really is. How is it after everything, after all the betrayal, lies, the name calling, the drunken rages, I sat in front of you with nothing but a feeling of pure love? Pure, fucked up love. A love neither of us understood, not where it came from, not how it lasted, and not where it was going to be put to rest, now that it was finally that time.

You had dropped acid not an hour or two before, and you told me that you were tripping, and apologized in advance if you laughed more than normal. But truthfully, it was the calmest I had ever seen you. You seemed present, and soft, and gentle, and kind. And it took every single ounce of whatever was in me to remind myself that this wasn’t really you. But boy, was it fucking convincing.

It didn’t take long before we were lying in the grass, looking at the stars, knowing you were high off the acid, and I was just high off of life. I kept it to myself, the irony of the fact that our first date consisted of the same. Lying in the grass, looking at the stars. I will never know if you had the same thought when you turned and looked at me, and saw there were tears welled up in my eyes.

We stayed up for hours and words were flowing, and when the words weren’t flowing, and memories weren’t being reminisced. You could just hear the music playing in the background. Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” was leaving the phone’s speaker and evaporating into the night air. “But if I stayed here with you girl, things just couldn’t be the same. Lord knows I can’t chaaaaange.”

When I asked if I could hold your hand, you immediately withdrew. And then, you told me. You were talking to somebody else. The welled up tears were now falling freely from my eyes. Silence. And then more music. When you noticed five minutes later, you had a different response from what I was used to. You asked what was wrong, and I told you nothing, I was sick. You pointed out I was never very good at lying. You told me you could understand that that had been a hard thing for me to hear. That you understood why I was hurting. And you hugged me.

Please tell me, where was this version of you? Where was this empathy five months ago when I was dry heaving on your bedroom floor?

I can’t explain last night. I stayed up until the sun was almost coming up just being with you. I had to soak you in because just like it always has been, these moments with you are fleeting and becoming fewer, until they are none. But I will never in my life forget it. I don’t understand what I’m feeling inside. I don’t know why I love you. I don’t know where it came from or how it stayed. I don’t know how the abuse seemed like a distant thought in that time last night.

And how come nostalgia is such a dirty liar? How come you don’t want me back? How come I still want you? I am still learning that closure might not always seem like closure when it is happening.