Are You Coming?

When you leave, I move to your side of the bed. When you're not home, I still move there. It makes me feel me closer.

I think of you all the time when we're apart. I wonder what you do, who you talk with, what you watch. I wonder who you are when I'm not around. When you're not around, I am not fully myself.

I look back, search back through all that has happened. Through the waiting, the tears, the smiles, the visits. I search back for the beginning. For when I let it all go and stepped onto my own path.

It was early fall, or mid fall. The idea of us had been played with. Dreamt about. But nothing put into action. I was having another spell, but you'd seen those spells before. I'd get reckless, disrespect myself, pretend to be happy. I was out of control, though few knew it. No direction, no purpose, not moving forward nor backward. Suspended in this constant state of unhappiness clouded by bottles of wine before bed. Just to sleep.

You called that day. I think hard of what your ring tone was back then. It changed with our changing status. I remember as clear as day where I was. At the top of the front stairs. Their fading gray paint always made me angry. Gray is no color for wood. 

Where you were was windy. You sounded out of breath and I imagined your cheeks red from cold. Quote will never come, some moments are so fleeting you only dream of remembering them in complete form. The conversation went something, paraphrased, like this:

-I signed with the company.

-That's really great, congratulations.

-That means I'm moving to the east coast after school.

-Oh.

-Are you coming?

Pause.

-Yes.

I was sitting on the bottom floor of the stairs. I could feel little pellets of kitty litter under my feet. I was hung over and cold. Shivers spread through my whole body. I had made up my mind to do whatever it took to get there. It seems millions of miles away. Trillions. Life times. But it didn't matter. It had to happen.

We were two people living separately. Pretending not to be interested when it was all we could think about. I imagine a movie montage of our lives, running parallel. His last years of college, my first in the real world. Days going by seamlessly but nights spent staring at the sky through cracked shutters. Wondering what he's doing. Waking to the alcohol induced text at 5am. 

How we got from there to here is still fuzzy. It feels like it all happened yesterday. It feels like I'm an ocean away from who I used to be. It feels like I'm a completely different person.

If you asked me three years ago where I would be on 2012, I would never have told you here. I would never have pegged him.

Forever and always.