how seamless seemed love and then came trouble

it's just like him, i realize. i shouldn't have expected anything more. off he's gone to be one with all things, to push up flowers and see the really big picture from afar, and here i am, thinking about him, like i've always done, like i'll do for the rest of my life.

there's nothing stranger than the fact that life goes on, that you can't cry forever, that eventually the memories don't hurt as much, that maybe someday they'll make me smile. you spend five years getting close to someone, learning them and loving them and arguing with them, you spend five years planning the next year and the next and the next twenty years, albeit loosely, like the kids that you are, and then you wake up one morning to find that he's gone, and your plans are for naught, and that when you think about him one thousand times a day, you're thinking about someone who does not exist outside of those thoughts.

you meet someone as a child, and you doom yourself to loving that person forever by virtue of the fact that you're growing up together, and when you do that, he becomes a part of you, and aspects of your person will always be indebted to him, just as aspects of his person were due, for better or worse, to your presence in his life. and then you wake up one morning, and realize that those hard-earned pieces of your personality, those painful lessons and those glorious awakenings, are all you have left of him.

you meet someone when you're vulnerable, and your wrap him up in the gossamer threads of your emotions from the first, and eventually, he gets vulnerable with you, and the threads pull tighter, until you are one hundred miles away from him and he is still more present to you than the person standing beside you, at all times.

you love someone for so long, and so hard, that it's a given like your next breath, like the sun rising, like the world spinning around. you love him even when you hate him, when you wish you'd never met him, when you spend your days thinking about not thinking about him anymore. you love him when you shouldn't, you love him when you don't love anyone else, you love him with every surge of blood your poor ragged heart pumps through your body. and then you wake up one morning to having to wonder what exactly you're supposed to do with that love, the same love that never arose for anyone else, the love that reason forgot.

so where does it go when it's gone? if you were here, you could tell me, matter-of-factly, the way you said everything, especially when i was being fantastical and ridiculous and emotional. alas.

“I seem to spend my life missing you!”