Work Text:
I keep thinking about the first time you said I love you. You were sitting across from me with fairy lights as the backdrop to your heart. (Yellow, you loved the colour too.) These were the kind of things we never outrightly stated, but understood either way. It was too late into the night to even call it a day anymore, and I was sipping on a mixture of passion fruit juice. You smiled, one hand tucked underneath your chin when you’re done reassuring me about your cat, and you said, look at me, falling in love twice when I didn’t mean to.
Did you know, a hurricane is hurling towards my city today and I feel so sick of being alone. Sick of having company. Sick of the in-betweens after a joke has taken flight. People have it worse but here I am, coiling inside the ancient loneliness we call a home. You told me about your day, it was the same old story and you slyly suggested we both live it up. A hurricane is hurling at me with winds of up to one hundred forty-nine kilometres per hour, and suddenly, I feel awfully ill if there isn’t you on the phone.
October is overwhelming. I met you in August and you called me and I hung up and we weren’t in love then, but we could be and if we had been together since, maybe dormant anniversaries would have blessed us both with more topics. The first bill hit me last weekend when I was pondering if you would have liked the bookstores here. In September, I grieved before the grieving because enough practice should ease one’s heart. You know this is the utmost pathetic lie, but we don’t call each other out. Nine in the evening and I let your voice stretch around my bedroom. It holds me, less sick while I stare at the pile of laundry I can’t bring myself to fold up. You don’t say you would have done it for me. No words. We just knew.
I took a uquiz recently and it told me more about you than myself. Maybe I can’t win when we are the same person in different fonts and formats. Sometimes I worry I am just an amalgamation of leftover poems written on wet napkins.
Ha.
We have the same houseplants and isn’t it hilarious how much we care for something called Devil’s Ivy?
Come home, I think. But I don’t have one and you don’t either. And it doesn’t matter if I can vocalise these words. I think it would have ruined me if we shared a bed. I don’t say I love you back on the last phone call.