Timeline

Something from March.

There are times when I think all I may ever know is crying. I sit and wade in puddles of my own endless emotions and count the times I’ve said sorry. The number doesn’t seem large enough, and I think, perhaps I should have apologized more. But for what? Would it have helped? 
I lie awake in bed at night and pull back the ends of my fingers trying to crack them like fragile reeds. The song that once reminded you of me is echoing from speakers, though I can barely make out the words. I mumbled along between the gasps of breath and the realizations that you’re gone. This song means nothing now, and I’d question if it ever did, but I know you’d never lie. 
I have to squint at anything that produces light because my migraines have come back. Perhaps it’s the heat, the stress, or the emptiness. I feel completely brain-dead, and all the empty space has turned to warm air expanding in my skull. The only thoughts I produce are of you. I suppose it was always this way, though.
My fingertips are blue from speaking too much without a pause, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I would give away everything for another second with you, another chance to speak one last “I’m sorry,” before vanishing eternally. 
Maybe, by chance, we’ll end up buried side-by-side, and our bones will chuckle with the irony and forgive our past mistakes. Weeping willows will grow from our marrow and the roots will stay sturdy with the sympathetic understandings we’ll have come across in our last years. Our headstones will deteriorate and our trees will be cut down for space, but our bodies will remain in place, cradling each other’s cracking fragments. 
People say I dream too wide, that I wait too long for something long gone, that I hold out for something too far, that I’m Gatsby and you’re the green light. I would disagree but I can’t, because it’s all true. I’m still waving goodbye to a ship that’s sunken. I’m still picking flowers for a shattered vase. I’m still writing you letters even though they’re always sent back. 
I could stand at the edge of every coastal point and allow the waves to erode at my skin, and sometimes I think I may, just to say I did. I mix salt into my shampoo and my soap to lie and say we live together in a beach house, lay together in the thick-aired nights. You live somewhere with too many people though, and I live in the mountains with too few, and we’re far apart but I still feel you here, moving hair from my face with your sandy palms. 
I will never understand how people can believe the past dies. I will never grasp where the time goes or how people can love one day and detest the next. I will never understand why I didn’t speak up, ask you to stay, grab your arm, and kiss your wrinkles to let you know I didn’t mean a word. 
I guess the past will always be set in stone, and I guess that no matter the distance, you’re still there, just not here. Moreover, in the grand scheme of it all, you’re still mine somewhere on the timeline; we’re still happy somewhere on that line.