Member-only story
All I Wanted Was You
But we were always going to be nevermore.
The light doesn’t fall through my curtains anymore. The moon doesn’t tug at the strands of my hair, dreams don’t make me smile in my sleep, and your warm breath on the back of my neck is just an illusion from another restless night where I tangle in bedsheets that have forgotten you.
Sometimes I wish it were as simple as calling you — letting my fingers find your name in my contacts and pressing my thumb to the pulse of the screen — but those are bygone days, bittersweet love potions, and failures to launch this hopeless energy from the cage of my chest.
You’re gone, and you planned it this way, and you know it’s just a matter of time before I forget.
But the forgetting — the tip-tap dance, the would’ve-could’ve-should’ve of it all, the tango we had misstepped too many times to count — is evading me in all its shades. I could cross the bridge all the way back to December, but it wouldn’t make a difference, would it?
I’ve loved, I’ve lost, and I’ve made my peace that you’re never going to meet me in the middle.
But that doesn’t mean I still don’t walk by that bridge every day and wonder what it would have been like if we hadn’t been too scared to see what lay on the other side of tomorrow’s kiss.
