A montage of goodbye

He and I were going to paint the kitchen yellow.

I thought about that last night while I was thinking of you and the way your shoulders sloped like hills and valleys. The way I would kiss them while you were sleeping soundly beside me, back turned.

I wondered why you always slept with your back to me.

I remembered one time where you had fallen asleep holding me while watching a movie late in my apartment one night on the thirteenth floor. I had gotten up to brush my teeth and by the time I returned you had already turned away and the spot we were intertwined was warm.

You and I were going to build a library with shelves to the ceiling

and a fireplace because my feet are always cold

and two desks with their back to each other

so we could work quietly like we used to with me cross legged on your bed pressed into the corner and you at the desk.

Was my presence enough?

Could you feel me in the room or when I was sleeping beside you?

You didn't feel the need to envelop me in every room we entered.

I thought about this the way I thought about the way you spoke

How memories are just montages, slices without context.

I could remember the way you said my name when you were frustrated with me

The sigh that would overshadow the syllables as they drug out 

It made me think of the way he used to call me Ash but those syllables drug out in a different way.

But I couldn't remember the way you called me pumpkin

The words were there but your voice wasn't

or the way you would say I love you

I could remember the way you would say "You forgot the I"

When I had casually slipped it into a conversation

Sometimes I felt like telling you that the lack of formality was because the words would slip out of me like a habit

That made me think of him and the way those words slipped out when I was leaving the car, door in my hand. The pause before I slammed it and ran. 

I remember the same feeling when you told me that day in early November, you said: "I think I'm falling in love with you."

The feeling I had in the spaces while I analyzed what that meant.

I remember the moment you asked me that night in December if you were loving me the way I needed to be loved but that moment is spliced with that spring night where I locked myself in the joined bathroom and sat on the floor and cried.

and you knew I was crying and I knew that you knew I was crying.

the way the uber driver asked me if someone had hurt me while taking me home because I was leaving a frat house in the middle of the night smelling of alcohol crying hysterically. 

It reminded me of that other Uber driver who played Taylor Swift while I drank a bottle of wine on the way to that house you hated when I found out what you had done in October. 

 

The same brand of wine we would drink and jump on the bed together and build forts. You would love me like a little kid, without inhibitions or filters. You would say things you didn't mean.

and you would also tell me not to compare you to him, him, or him.

That sentence made me think of him and how he loved her.

And that makes me think of you and if you'll ever love someone the way you loved me. If you'll love differently.

I think of the way he came back that night.

And if he reads this it isn't a love letter to him.

I loved you deeper and fuller, more painfully.

But the way I'm left with a montage of grief feels the same.

In the way I mourn an abstract daughter.

And a kitchen or a library or a carpool schedule.

The way I would hold my breath at headlights across the window

and the way I still look for pennies on the sidewalk

or how I half expect to walk upstairs with groceries looped on my arm to see you sitting beside my door waiting.

It's all a montage. Cut together closely.

Just enough that I can see the end coming.