I can’t get myself to put the now half-empty bottle of wine we shared back into the fridge. It rests quietly on my desk, bare and warm like your skin from when I hugged you goodbye for the last time as we shared our last kiss — soft, slow and gentle. I pulled away so you wouldn’t feel the sudden flash of cold from my tear hitting your cheek, wishing ardently that I never drew away from your peach-stained lips. 

You were always careful with your words from the very first time, crafting your sentences with a hint of reservation and distance to not give up too much. We knew that this would eventually end before it even began. I should have learned from you and stood still instead of closing the graceful gap by stepping too close to you. You are starting a new life, far from Michigan, far from your past and far from me. A thick red circle marking your last day here has been scribbled onto the crumpled calendar in the back of my head. That day seemed so far away until I stood in front of you and we said our plastic goodbye. The words pooled out of my mouth as I gulped down the long, over-emotional speech I had spent days preparing to tell you. You fiddled with the sticking lock on my apartment door for the last time to go to a house that you can no longer call home, to pack it all away into “keep” and “throw” boxes, one of which will contain your memories of me, a tiny cardboard box that I will never know the title of. 

You’re thousands of miles away, while I lay in the same outline you left on my bed, stuck in its faded imprint, sinking into the mark you left. But now as I lay, and my arm reaches out next to me, I am met with cold air because the warmth left with you. I can’t taste any sweetness from the hint of berry or peach wine on your lips or feel your curly hair underneath my palm. I feel no burning through my skin, as your eyes are no longer there to gaze too deeply into mine, or to linger over the rest of me with an intensity I had never seen before. The cold air has now put out the fire within my skin. I am stuck in a room decorated too rosy for your understanding, filled with memories of laying next to you into the late hours of a Wednesday night as the crowded street outside my window turns silent, broken by the sound of our laughs and the hushed murmurs we shared. The silence eventually takes over us, as I accidentally close my eyes for a couple of seconds too long from the comfort your tired voice brings and from the softness of your exposed skin against mine. I am stuck with memories of the shiver that ran through my skin, forming little bumps all over my body as my leg unknowingly brushed yours, as our hands grazed for the first time, innocence woven into our skin, stopping them from holding onto each other. I am stuck with the words of the sweet nothings you whispered into my ear as we lay with a space too small for reservations between us, rippling through my head, flooding every fold in my brain like molasses — slow and steady — staining the walls with an irremovable sticky residue. I am stuck with your portrait above my bed, as our faces lay so close that I can remember every little dot and freckle that painted your face, that your essence, with nodes of slightly over-sweetened caramelized charm and accents of delicate reticence, filled every deep breath I could take, leaving me beautifully fragile. And now that essence is gone. No matter how deep a breath I take, no matter how deep into the sheets I lay, no matter how hard I try, I can no longer smell your sugary cologne, and I can no longer feel your lasting presence next to me. 

I didn’t mean for this to happen. I didn’t mean to catch these stupid feelings that now haunt me as I walk to class or try to distract myself at work. They loom over me, trailing me through a heavy cloud, the same way your eyes always did whenever we were together. They stare too far into my shielded body, pulling and twisting every emotion out of me, sharply opening me up so that everything in my body spills out as I desperately try to sew my skin back together to catch any bit of dignity I have left. To stop myself from sharing too much and scaring you away, from unloading the trauma caused by the men that lay in your outline before you. Yet here I am, pulling the uneven poorly done stitches out of my skin, dumping out my feelings that the needle trapped inside. The words shoved into my flesh pour out onto a page for all to read, yet I can’t decide if I ever want you to be on the other side of the page.

But now that you have left, the weather is stormy and hazy. There is no sunshine that shines on your face as we wake up, painting your eyes a new shade of brown. There are no birds that annoyingly chirp at my window, echoing in my room after forgetting to shut it the night before, waking us up a couple of minutes before your jarring alarm. There is no more drawing little hearts on your back as I shut my eyes sleepily from staying up with you for too long. There are no more innocent smiles, or tender kisses, crinkling eyes or interwoven fingers. There is no more “we” or “us” or anything other than a “situationship” that once was.

A part of me wishes I had never even met you, never spoken to you in the first place, never kissed you or let you hold me when I lay the most vulnerable I can be. Then at least I’d never know what I’d be losing. 

But this is how it goes, right? I am told it will get better. In a couple of months, I suppose I’ll forget the sound of your voice, I’ll forget the way you laugh and I’ll forget the little face you make every time I tease you. I’ll forget all those long explanations that you now know I sometimes zone out to and the way you’d play with my hair, ignoring the tangles that stopped your finger from running through it. You’ll surprisingly show up in my dream on a random Tuesday night, becoming a talking point with my friends instead of a nightly routine. I’ll pick up the same CD you always put into my bedside player without a second thought. I’ll open another bottle of Barefoot Peach Fruitscato without remembering all the jokes you made about me liking it, or the amount of times we’d finish a bottle. Slowly but surely, the memories will fade until you become just another scar on my arm that only gets asked about on a late Wednesday night after too much Fruitscato as I unravel the healed stitches once again. I’ll take these memories and learn from them, eventually thanking you for the life lessons I have earned. And for this, I am supposed to be grateful, grateful that eventually, we will become two strangers knowing nothing about each other or where we end up. But I don’t want to be strangers. I don’t want to thank you or learn from you and just trade you as an old story at the bar.

But the part that hurts the most is what if? What if we had met earlier? What if you weren’t leaving? What if we worked? And maybe this is all in my head, yours preoccupied with the excitement of starting over, moving to a new place and maybe finding someone new, mine mourning what never was, holding grief over unwritten chapters, melancholy over fading memories.

But I’ll hold on to them like the broken seashells I collected at the beach years ago by my parents’ homes, each piece sharp from its break, but holding a battered story of its own. And I’ll place them in the little cardboard box scribbled “keep” above my closet, reminding me that even in the past, there is still hope and eternity.