Pictures of you and I can hear your voice. You’re seventeen now and I loved you when you were eleven. I remember all of it. Your voice completely hidden now after you went through puberty. The voice I’ll never hear again only in my memories. Not even a hint of it in your voice now. Your laugh that made it so impossible not to laugh once you’ve heard it. A laugh that can cure all types of sadness in the world and make everything happy even if it was only for a second. I miss you so much.
Sometimes I just want to ring you up and hear your voice and then somehow that can turn into a late night phone call. You can tell me what I’ve missed, which is everything. I can be your 365 day planner and you flip and flip through days and months and you point on a Wednesday and say, I fell in love here. You’ll point at April 28, 2012 which was prom night and you’ll tell me that you kissed her. You kissed her with your hands on her waist, her arms wrapped around your neck, and you liked it. You liked it a lot and you thought that one day you could love her and you thought that she was beautiful and everything in the world would be okay as long as you would have this moment. In May, that’s when everything went wrong or right, whichever one is true. And I want to know how your season went with your sport/life and how it’s going right now. In January, you can tell me if you made any resolutions and if you’re still trying to follow them. I want to know if you fixed that C in Spanish and why you didn’t do Fantastics. I want to hear about your family lately and I want to know your brother’s goddamn name. Your favorite TV shows, the bands you’re listening to, if you watch baseball games. I want to know you now. Can I call you and can you stay up with me all night? Because I love you I love you I love you and I miss you so so much I can’t even stand it right now.
I don’t love you enough to be mad at you anymore.
I want to believe that you’re all grown up now and you know how to love somebody. I want to believe that seeing her face is more important than seeing her naked. And you memorize the smell of her skin in your bed or in the sun. When she falls asleep on the floor, you carefully lift her head onto a pillow and cover her with a blanket. You watch her for a while and think to yourself, I’ve never seen anything so beautiful, the way she sleeps. I want to believe that you know how she speaks and what she means when she says the things she says. You listen carefully when she speaks from her heart because you know she doesn’t do that very often. You listen to her little complaints, when she sings, and the way she yells at inanimate objects. You listen to the thoughts of her mind and you love her. You love everything about her. And you know how to be there for her and you know how to love her. You know how not to keep her waiting, to keep her believing, to keep her loving. I want to believe in that.
Too much and not enough at all. Your eyes when I feel like they’re looking at me. Like there’s something in me that you see. But it wasn’t, was it? It wasn’t me that you were looking at. It was everything but me. And you’re wondering wondering why I can’t stop staring. Why can’t I stop staring? Not only are you beautiful, but I love you. I loved you yesterday and I love you today. I love you every day of my life. I want to drown in how much you love me. I want to feel it in my chest. I want to wake up to it in the morning. Your voice, the music that plays every second of my day. Your body that fits so perfectly with mine. Your hands. I love your hands. I want to be with you I want to love you I want you looking at me. Can you look at me? Can you look at me and see me? With an expression on your face that doesn’t look mad or sad and just looking at me. When you see me walking away, do you tell yourself what I tell myself? I could have had that, that could’ve been mine, why didn’t it work? And you see me and you sigh and you run at the sight of me because I’m not yours. I’m not yours and you’re not mine.
The songs are different and so is my handwriting. I used to run faster and I used to smile more even though those smiles were fake. I was sad and nothing was right. Everything’s better now. I wanted a boy with blond hair to love me; I don’t want that anymore. The way I used to stand, the rhythm of my footsteps. I don’t have my old best friend. My shirts are the same, and so are my shoes. My hair—it’s brown with really light tips. Before, the light was the roots. I was probably smarter back then and much more naive. I didn’t wear shorts. I was different back then. I was different when I met you.
The Giants are at their 13th inning right now and it’s been a while since they’ve gotten a hit. This game is just messy and ugly and long and I don’t expect anything, truth be told. And do you know what I’m thinking of?
I’m thinking of you and I arguing over what sport is better. Mine or yours. I can hear you say, Soccer’s better because there is no overtime. There’s ties! or some crap like that and it’s making me sad and miss you so much.
My sport’s better, of course. Always have been. Always will be.
<3
I don’t even want to try to pretend that you get what I’m saying. Of course you don’t get what I’m saying. There is a moment and in that moment that’s what I’m feeling. Sometimes, there is no explanation. Sometimes, there is no need to talk about it. Sometimes, there is just something I need to say. I wanted to say what I said just to say it because in that moment that was what I was feeling. That’s what I was thinking. And I’ve had a lot of those moments silently to myself and sometimes I think that’s where it belongs. To me. It is mine. It is not yours. It will never be yours. So why say them? You don’t understand, never did, never will, so why am I even talking?
I’m sitting here completely at a loss of what to say to you. I want to tell you how I really feel, but I can’t. I won’t. Every time I tell somebody how I feel, I’m always hurting them. I think I’m doing myself a favor when I’m not. I always say that I don’t care who I hurt with my words, but what crap that is. Of course I care. I’m mean with my words, uncaring. Dismissive. But I can’t do that to you. Out of all people, I would never do it to you. But what about me? What do I do? Do I keep it myself? Bury it inside my chest so deep inside me nobody else can find it?
I want to tell you that I don’t know what to tell you anymore. All of the things I’ve told you don’t fit me anymore and all of the things I haven’t told you I don’t want to tell anybody. It’s time I started keeping things to myself. I talk too much, but I don’t talk anymore. WHAT CAN I SAY? I don’t want to say anything, nothing at all.
And what is the point of this? I’m basically repeating that I don’t want to tell anybody anything but I do. I do. But not to you not to anybody. How will I turn these words into something somebody will understand? How will I make them think that what it is is okay that I’m not weird or stupid or crazy? And everybody thinks they’re different or that they notice when they don’t. They don’t they don’t they don’t. They do but what of those things actually matter? I want to talk to somebody about things that actually matter. I’m tired of trying to go deeper just to return to the surface. There is more to this, more than that. But I’m tired of talking. I’m tired of these words I’m trying to say just so nobody can understand them, nobody wants to talk about it, everybody is tired of them.
Well I’m tired, too. I’m tired too.
The things you told me I’m not sure I believe. I believe you more than anybody in the world and I trust what you have to say, but when it’s about me and the thing I love, then I’m not sure. But I do believe you. I believe you because you believe in me in the way I want to believe in myself. You believe in me like everybody in the world needs someone to believe in them. I don’t think you know how much you can possibly mean to me. I wrote you a two sentence card but there’s not enough room and space to possibly say the things I mean to say.
You love me and that’s enough.
