I drink milky sugared coffee. The way you would drink it.
Too sweet and too bitter. Tastes that take me back to coffee cups that were
ours. Days that were us. Untidy years sprawl together and meet today. They
bunch up and pocket here. At number four. Tiny four years, an infant, just escaping
toddler tantrums. But also far too long. I think that you control my Spotify.
Think you put on songs that we shared. So I can curl into them safe and lost. I
think you hold me when the pain starts, the familiar waves of crunching,
tightening lungs that retch 'I miss you. I really fucking miss you and I can't,
and I won't believe you're gone.' I am caught in years, the ones that are past
and the ones that I count hopelessly and hatefully on fingers that desperately
grasp for someone who cannot hold them back. Empty air. Too much space between
now and when I saw you last, and it'll only stretch on. Only pull forward. And
I only have those pictures that flash between memories that seem to creep into
the distance, creep into the pages of a book that doesn’t exist, that I once
read about someone else's life, not mine, not his, not ours. And now we
wake up for coffee in the morning, chew cereal and kiss goodbye. Work days
and return to each other. Lazy evenings filled with love. Long weekends stacked
up high with creating and music and busy noisy happy people. Adventures in a
playground world. If only it were my reality. If only.
