When I stepped into the elevator to bring me to the lobby, where you were absentmindedly pretending to study a painting, it smelled like you. I wasn’t expecting that to be the moment before we were reunited, a handful of seconds where I was tangibly reminded of your linger. How you haunted even the most unexpected spaces for months after we stopped speaking, and in the week or two leading up to this, slithered back into my life though sloppy text messages and things past due. As we walked to your car, I asked you how the drive was and you simply replied, “a drive to you is always a good one.”

It had been over a year since I said goodbye in an airport. It didn’t feel romantic, the painful detachment of two bodies that didn’t fit right, but wanted to. Deep down, I knew it wouldn’t work but I kept believing in it earnestly. I sat with a respected author to review a manuscript I wrote about a trip that would eventually lead me back to him, and I didn’t know how to explain any of it, that relationship. We ended up with a story, I laughed.

I’ve been thinking about expiration dates lately. What happens when we return to someone or something that is already past due. When we trick ourselves into believing that if we slide in one more conversation, ignoring the fact that it doesn’t need to be reevaluated. What happens when something has an end pre-determined. What happens when we trick that ending into going somewhere else so we can just stay a little bit longer. Love always feels like cheating the system to me, eluding expectations.

A week ago I got that familiar drop in my stomach when I woke before you and kissed you lightly and remembered I had to get on the bus again. I got back to Chicago and felt the heaviness, was reminded of how unbearable my happiness has been this semester. I sway in between finding comfort in the fact that a boy lifts me out of that, that a boy can be an unflinching reminder of the good that exists and the anger that means I require someone else to pull me out of the rot I let myself wallow in. I have said a million times these past few weeks that I need it to be easier, that I need to able to release all this anxiety.  I told you, this is the worst part and you simply replied “it’s almost over.” That was enough.

But what does that mean? To have been patient for a year and a half. To have waited at the end of wires, to curl myself into bus seats, to steal nights where one of us is always falling asleep too soon. To have hoped for togetherness. Perhaps it is enough to have a break in the cycle, despite the fact that there will be new loops to throw myself through, struggles I can’t predict. For months I said, We will be here until.Until summer, until winter. Until a year passes. Until graduation, until my lease is up. There is an indefinite now.

There is no expiration date, no plotted detachment. There are no spaces for you to linger past due, because you don’t have to be. Present is something entirely new.

1 month agoApril 22, 2013 42 notes remember when I actually gave a shit about what I posted here? me either