I thought I forgot you for a minute there. You hid behind the random existence of every day life. You hid behind the small part of me that gets obsessive-compulsive in certain situations. That just-out-of-view blind spot that I have. You hid there and I thought I had forgotten about you.
And then I catch a reminder and smirk to myself.
“No way,” I tell myself.
You’ve seeped too deep into my skin for me to just forget about you like that. That would be too easy and we’ve never been easy.
“I can’t remember.”
“You can’t remember what?”
“I don’t know. I just can’t remember. There was something there. Something important and now its gone. You know that feeling? Where you know you wanted to keep something but you let it slip through the cracks?”
“I do. Or something similar.”
“Like what?”
“I caused the cracks.”
What even made me pursue you to begin with? You weren’t the type I thought I wanted, and you were nearly its antithesis. I guess certain things break through when it’s right. Your dark stares did me in. I can still feel them when I close my eyes even though yours are closed to mine.
Can I be that man again? The one who didn’t know who you were or the impact you would have. Look at me. I’m stuck. Forward my mail to the that place between dreams and awake because I can’t seem to get a foothold from there.
I still can’t not want you though. That’s the difficult part. It should be over but it’s never over for the one who still wanted it to continue. Is this a broken heart? I don’t even know because as much as I wanted to be in love before I never really was. It was simply a wish and a dream. Forced. Nothing has ever felt like this, or that.
I wasn’t looking before you. I saw you and it was fine. We talked but nothing came of it. I didn’t want anyone. There was no love pursued. There was no fallen lust that I was under. I didn’t think of you daily and miss you hourly. Your teeth on my neck never felt like the only place they should ever be when they weren’t against my lips. I was without and felt fulfilled. Is it possible to go back to that? To be a man with nothing and not know it? Can I be him again?
Can the mind be spotless if it once was unclean?
Tattered with memories, a dull against the sheen.
Tears in the fabric and divots in the grass
Eternity mocking me, sunshine never lasts.
Love will always wound in a garish and ugly way,
Affected hearts as a marionette in uncommon displays.
Though unwelcome and uninvited pain pours itself a drink
It lingers in the background and forces us to think.
Memories unrelenting, they spin and spin and spin
Attached to my instrument, chords plucking from within.
As the strings go silent bringing calm to crashing waves
Unable to forget, what was never asked but still she gave.
Eloisa, Clementine and the girl all chose to quit,
but Abelard, Joel and I cannot as easily forget.
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.-Pablo Neruda
I want to forget you.
It would be so much easier to just forget you.
I wish there was a way to wipe you from my memory,
so when I heard a love song my immediate smile wouldn’t be followed by a dulled ache.
I could drown myself in other women.
I’ve tried,
but I compare every one of them to you and they can’t match your stare.
I’ve spilled so many words on the love I sought in your eyes.
Words of lust and passion,
of hope.
They were all returned unopened with postage due.
If forgetting means losing the memory of your heated fists in my hair and your hungry tongue in my mouth then I would trade that to lose the dead look in your eyes as you stared at me the last time we spoke.
I want to forget you because you’re never coming back,
but forgetting is like a having a dream
you can’t ask yourself to have it,
it just happens when you stop trying so hard to stay awake.
A Hopeless Romantic, Stirred 