It’s funny how we miss things. How when I say “Oh, I missed it,” I mean that I forgot about it, that it wasn’t important enough to me to remember or to go to, and when I say “Oh, I miss you,” it means that I cannot forget you. That I cannot leave you behind.

We only miss the important people, and we only miss the trivial things. The day after you gave me the things I told you I missed, I ended up leaving most of them behind. They were not what I needed to make space in my suitcase for. The things I missed were the things that I could not hold on to anyway- time, which unraveled in my hand, like an old t-shirt’s hem becoming one long, crumpled string as I tugged and tugged at it; air, which I can feel constantly cycling, each molecule once in the breath of someone great and someone terrible; the way things were. And I could not hold on to how we were, or how you were.

And you are different now. You are loved and loving in a love that was not meant for me. I cannot love you in the way you know how to be loved now. I need to stop trying to love you in the way that we once loved each other. I need to stop trying to love you in the way he loves you now.

It sometimes hurts that all of your poems have become about him.

I feel like all my poems now keep coming back to you. I’m not sure if it’s you or who you were or who we were but I just know that I miss it and I want it and I sometimes hate who I am now and who you are now because we are not we anymore. But you are so beautiful in his love. And I am becoming so beautiful in mine.