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You always were more sentimental in my head. That was my projection, I can see now. It should be impossible, but you seem even colder now than before. You pause before saying my name, like it’s a bitter pill to swallow, like you have to inject neutrality into it or else you’ll give too much away.
Your voice is strange to me. It shouldn’t be. I thought I had it catalogued into your myriad emotions and memorised down to the intonations of syllables. It turns out I was wrong. The voice I’ve been hearing in my head, the voice I thought was yours, isn’t the same. Superficially, it has the same cadence. But you’re not the saner, more reasonable, more human voice I built up in my head. It’s all wrong. You’re all wrong.
When you weren’t here — when you were busy being dead — I could have conversations with you (in my head) without restraint, without consequences. Ella would call it a coping mechanism. In my head, you agitated me, amused me, amazed me. The rules of social acceptability didn’t apply there. You didn’t get stroppy, you didn’t feel the pull of danger liquid through your veins, you didn’t ever leave me behind at a crime scene.
Now that you’re back, it’s as if you’re further from me than ever before.