I’m Living My Best Life Without You

Or that’s what I’m telling myself.

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-in-white-shirt-and-blue-denim-shorts-holding-yellow-and-red-balloons-3905907/

I can’t remember the last time we spoke, but maybe that’s okay.

Maybe that means I’m finally moving on.

But the deleted messages — every single one, cut away from my digital handprint as if they’d never existed in the first place — are just a shadow of meaning when the gut punch hits me.

My friend brings you up in casual conversation, and I freeze up as if I’ve just been spotted by a hunter in the wilderness. She doesn’t notice — of course she doesn’t because I’m the master of the mask — but I still hang onto every word of news about you as if I’m hungry for knowledge.

But we all know curiosity has a way of killing the cat.

I try to tell myself it doesn’t matter what I hear about you. I try to tell myself that our histories are divorced from each other from this point onward. I try to tell myself you were just a phase that lasted a little longer than usual.

But my dreams call me a liar when you pace the hallways of my mind. You’re restless — you’re always so restless — as if I’ve locked you in a cage. And maybe I have. Who knows what dreams do to our collective psyche?

Even so, I go through the motions of moving on. I scraped away the girl I tried…