do you think i have forgotten about you?
Maybe someday the memory of you will be lost.
But I don’t think that’s possible. It’s not possible because I don’t think I want to forget you. When I look back at my teenage years, from the childish 15-year-old girl I was to the delusional 16-year-old girl whose heart pounded like drums in her chest before jumping onto her sleeves; I see many things. I see happiness, anxiety, stress, and in the midst of it all: you.
I don’t want to forget you. I don’t want to forget how your brown eyes seemed to linger on mine a bit too long for it to be causal. I don’t want to forget how your attention was on me despite talking to someone else — to put it simply, I won’t miss you, but I won’t forget you either. You were a key figure, a pause in my world when everywhere else kept revolving, a striking color amongst monochrome lenses.
You were my favorite heartbreak.
When most people think of heartbreak they think: of curling up in bed with a tear-stained face, glass-shattering pain, memories kissed and stained blue, a bruise they want to bandage until it scars and only the remains of it are there, pressed and flushed a pretty purple, a wound that had hurt but healed and soon new skin will replace it. A memory erased. Invisible to the naked eye.
But that heartbreak doesn’t apply to you, because you are a memory I will always choose to remember. A scar that I don’t want to fade. I’ll always want you in my head, somewhere, not pushed into a cold corner, nor the forefront of my mind, but just there.
I want to look back at this in ten years and laugh at how crazy I was over a boy. I want to look back at this a decade from now and remember you as the boy who made me realize that it is possible to want to love someone despite their flaws.
I never got to fully love you. You never allowed me to.
I think I’ll always wonder why, because if you would’ve at least let me in, even if that meant just toeing by the front door of your chained heart, I would’ve promised you I wouldn’t disappear if you stayed. I would’ve loved you, if you had let me. And maybe you had known. Had known how hard I would’ve fallen if you had let me because my eyes dripped honey whenever I looked at you, my words were laced with sugar, sweetness coating my tongue whenever we spoke.
You had known. You had always known there would always be something between us even if we didn’t say it. And maybe that’s the reason we will never be anything more than a couple sentences in each other’s books, we will be characters that pop in and out of each other’s story, the characters that don’t stay till the end because they aren’t needed anymore. Your part in my story is over, and I have to accept it.
I don’t want to forget you, but maybe there’s a reason why I keep saying that, a feeling that crawls onto my skin, prickling in its wake.
If you were a memory blown away in the wind, I’d do everything to keep you from slipping into the ephemeral moments called time. Time will fade you into a blur. And maybe one day, I will forget it all: the sound of your laugh, the tone of your voice when you lost a round of Uno to me, the image of our hands side-by-side as we compared skin tones, the look in your eye when it felt like I was the only one you could see despite being in a room full of people, the feeling of wings fluttering in my stomach, flying through my rib cages, rapid flutters that set my body on fire whenever we were together. It will all become a blur, I know it will.
I know I will forget you and that scares me. I loved you so much, I am scared of forgetting you.
So for now, I’ll hold onto your memory tight, I will remember every line on your palm, every crinkle in your smile, and the delicate honey-colored shade of your eyes. I will continue to love you until time comes to blur you into a forgotten haze.
