Remember The Girl You Left Behind

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Remember the girl you met in the library during that late winter evening. Remember the chewed up #2 pencil wedged carelessly amidst her bleached auburn hair and rusted locket she grasped so tightly with her delicate hand. Remember the espresso-stained knit sweater, fading paint splatters on her jeans, and sneakers with worn-out laces she could not be bothered to tie.

Remember the way she wrote, a chaotic blend of print and script. She wrote nimbly on the dog-eared pages of a knockoff moleskine journal — of emotions she never felt, of people she never met, of love she never got. Such an imagination could only be possessed by the loneliest.

Remember the tales that stumbled through her lips and the thoughts that suffocated her into unconscious nightmares. You chipped through the concrete fortress only to leave it frail and vulnerable.

Remember her expressing the tragic restlessness to the way she thought about you. Remember that day you woke up feeling differently. Now, like the walls of her bedroom, there are gaps in where there were once photographs of you.

Remember her apathetic “Excuse me,” the last time she’ll ever address you, as she bumped into you by the exit of the library. She looked at you momentarily, eyes smudged with day-old mascara, and pushed through the doors without another word. The snow was not the coldest thing you came across that night.

Remember watching her leave into the frosty streets of Hamilton, probably humming whatever was on her Spotify playlist that week, with no intention of looking back.