WRITTEN MEMORIES OF A LOVE LONG GONE. (OR WHEN YOU FALL OUT OF LOVE BECAUSE HE NEVER APPRECIATED YOUR WRITING THE WAY HE SHOULD).

It’s 5am. One of those early morning conversations.

While you read all the poems and half written songs, the texts walls and half baked rants (all of them written about you, written to you) and you discover for the first time everything I’ve always shown you, everything that’s been always right there on display, on my skin for the world to see it, all those things you have somehow always missed it (and sometimes I wonder if you chose that blindness, I’m almost certain…)…well, that’s when the other shoe drops.

I think I was supposed to feel as if you were reading me. Deciphering me. Instead, I just don’t see the point. I said in passing once, how I felt this lack of inspiration, surrounding me like a ghostly presence. The evidence of absence. The opposite of myself of one, two years before. Before, I drowned. I overflowed. Now, there’s nothing.

Maybe it’s Time, showing me that intensity doesn’t equal depth. Or perhaps depth is not the main goal to be achieved, but lightness and peace of mind.

Or maybe it’s just me, becoming empty.

Your voice cuts off the stream of thoughts. “I’m gonna write about you too”, you say, words that sound too much like an apology. “I’m gonna show you how I really feel”. Will you, really? Do I even wanna read what you have to say?

• Something nobody tells you about writers: words are our copying mechanism and our armor and also our weapon. It can tear you apart. Nobody wants their arm in a lion’s mouth.

I used to think that the eternal doubt that hanged over us was actually the eternal fuel that never let you die inside of me. The eternal push that always guided your steps back to my path. Because this is how it usually went: you arrived, stumbling and making a mess. And I would patiently pick up whatever you dropped, clean the mess you made, push away and lock behind doors anything that took up too much space, everything so you could fit in.

In those ancient days, I used to throw some things into the trash can, just so you could settle in better, just so you could be more comfortable. So you could occupy a place I thought was rightfully yours.

Now I’ve just come to realize I don’t do that anymore. I don’t get rid of anything for you any longer, and worse, I don’t want to get rid of any part of me, not for someone else, not even for you. Especially for you. It was hard enough to get them back whenever I felt you gone.

So today, I kinda just watch you from the sidelines. There, the ghostly presence. I see you trying to adjust, looking around not knowing where to stand. I see you feeling crowded, cautiously trying not to disturb anything around you. You look at me, ask for help, and you don’t understand why this time around, I just shake my head.

This time is up to you. Which I know it reads: our time is up.