I’ve already forgotten the way your arms felt like when they wrapped around me. I would like to imagine that you had felt the same way the warmth that envelopes you on a sultry August evening inside of a car with all the windows down does. I cannot quite remember the sensation of the way your fingertips felt as they quietly pressed into my skin. Four sided designs would trickle down my spine disappearing seconds after their surface. During the summer months our legs would peel away from each other with a soft tug. Some film using mirrors as motifs was playing on mute while a song we didn’t hear enough of would accompany our nights underneath those itchy and thinning blankets. A small blue glow from the wall where the subtitles of dialogue we couldn’t relate to would seep out. We spoke with our lips and our hands, our hipbones and our sweaty skin.
I regret not being able to make each other’s lives easier and brighter for longer. More kisses and less screaming could have been of some help, but I have never thought the end of it all was about falling out of love. I have perceived our entire almost five years together as a reverberation of scenarios we were both hoping for inside of our heads. We would watch these scenarios unfold in real life as plans disentangled themselves from our calendars, our late night conversations obsessively ending on punk music or the places we felt most like climbing in our car and driving to. I cannot remember who started having different plans first. I cannot remember whose changing scenarios began to clash first. A feeling less like guilt and more like growth leads me to believe that the change started inside of me. I think it was because of that impromptu middle of the night road trip I took to Chicago that one night, when I was still living in Michigan. I went without you, with my three closest friends. It was only a twelve-hour trip, eight of those on the road, but it snagged on this sensation that sat like a rock inside of me. An uncomfortable pebble that lay stagnant at the very bottom of my stomach where it had sat still for three years. I had never felt it as consciously as I did when we drove between the endless, looming buildings which seemed to be the only thing holding up the dusty, black blanket the sky had turned into, completely bare of the stars I knew from home. I felt it shiver beneath me, and as I felt the knot swell, pushing against the constraints of my skin and bones and I understood that this knot had been formed out of complacency. I understood that I needed more buildings and more people. I needed less television and most importantly I felt that I needed less exchanges of extraneous and meager words. I could tell it was too big to stay inside of me anymore. And rather than having my body burst, I chose to leave.
Maybe I’m growing up and you’re growing sideways. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the other way around.
***
The cold linoleum feels smooth beneath my fingertips. My heavy arms slide forwards and backwards across the grimy stretch, as far as my hands could reach. I write my name in the thin layer of ash and dirt, digressing from the “N” to paint small designs into my apartment’s floor. My eyes lose sight of the etchings I have made, their impression unable to delve below the surface of my new canvas. My arm sticks out from me like a ragdoll hanging upside down by her legs, and in slow and deliberate movements I touched and I felt the linoleum. And it reminded me of the way the freshly poured cement of the driveway of the house I grew up in would feel after a chilly summer drizzle.
I spend nights in my bed, running my hands over the cold sheets in a hope of finding a sliver of the way you felt. I walk along train platforms and my hands drag lightly against the cardboard advertisements, the metal benches and escalator railings. I search for you in my every day, beneath the damp and dripping towel from my early morning shower, behind the glossy exterior of a brand new book, or somewhere between the sticky residues that gather on your fingers after playing with the label of a beer bottle.
