Those days were commutes of endless and tangled churning. I vanished into anticipatory train rides, so dreamy and so melancholic. It was a feeling of coming back to a familiar someone, a holiday feast, a warmness and being-of-self. I felt a pursuit of existence, my own existence shared with another, to have a life I believed never was written in my cards, to live a life so innocently wanted, no matter how small. Time hardly went by during the simmer of daylight changes and the soft chill of dusks. We were full of unawareness of the metropolis far removed by lengthy tracks and tunnels diving into our world of unpolished garnet.

There I find you, which to me, is a sunny morning bike ride through Queens, the imposing architecture that makes the seasonal changes feel so haunted, an understated giddiness from childhood, the fullness after eating, freshly cut cactus with the earthy scent of mowed grass, defeated attempts of climbing a fence, and the slow decay of decorated gourds. Life was us lying on the grass and wrapping the dirt under my fingers only then to pluck flowers along the sidewalk, for you. Our wordless communication faded into quiet, unpolluted coexistence, an effervescence of fearless devotion to breathing, together. The days were the iridescent droplets of shower water on my phone screen, an afternoon balanced in my mind infused by citrus and pine ambience. In our heaviness, I learned how much we differed from the clamor outside. You were a rare comfort to me when everything else became so harsh, savoring moments that sailed through the amber haze afternoons.

Suspended on soft petals unweighted by the iron life we unknowingly asked for, we became the surrealism depicted in paintings and prose of years ago.  Those chamomile sun rays were encoded in my chemistry, transfixed by the orbs looming over my head pillows imprinting a need for vitality. The thrill of knowing that there are still great loves in my life, the day you read it on my palm, of foreseeing its arrival. How that moment clanged on my internal apprehension that my heartstrings were now outlining the inscriptions written on the walls of decayed monuments. There is no love without unreality, a transfixed removed quality of living with everything perceived, that those apparitions were not within my eyes but existed in full form somewhere beyond them. 

We saw four seasons together and tried our best to stretch with the gradual transitions. But not all things are mended, stress fractures in my soul, that against all efforts we can still break. Now by the end, a phrase revolves in my head: if I never see you again, please know, I wanted to. What I never wanted was the twisting burns of friction that could've happened inside of you or the deep pain of open wounds with nerves touching the air. I never wanted your broken sleep with ominous visions seen during a lunar eclipse.  Then a worse fear hits when you told me you changed since me. Among the intonations with their connotations dashed by micro-pauses, I heard a whisper that I should be flattered. Yet instead, I was gutted, wishing to avoid my shadows and the honest truth of how altering my presence might have been, how diluting I was on your truest forms. We weren't a world of unprocessed negatives. We were images in motion with colors full of individual power. You are all these things and more, without me. I wish I could whisper back to never change for me or because of me or to spite me. Never give a compliment as small as the one you gave me. 

The weeks have passed with the neighborhood of golden hours untraced by my footsteps. Our moments live in retrospective back glances, an unpublished poetry book stacked in archival corners. How those ambient daydreams are imprinted on my inner linings and the tissues deep within. The changes of the daylight now seem so relentless, moving up further from wishful thinking of the past, further from each other. How loss reverberates throughout my spirit and how often I revisit what lives there, reaching down to the anchors of where we used to be. In my willful drifting, another phrase enters my mind revolutions: I wish and always will wish the best for you, that you will have softness, openness, connection, and a belief in all things better. I would pick each morsel of goodness from the top branches of this life tree only to give them to you, if I could. 

I feel my body trying to fix itself by letting loss feel good and moving on as an unshackling. I release my clenched hand to relax the tensed muscles holding on for too long. I'm waking up on sunbeam soaked riverside days, catching the clear aquamarine raindrops with my tongue, finding my ceremonial ground to encircle and reenter myself. I let my body to drift up with the plumes into exospheric beauty and to see fully that not all things close to the sun will fall, that I can hover in my disbelief and brief comforts for just a while longer. My fate is to look down on the golden blue horizons hovering over seas below, only to realize that the crashing of waves isn't just a testament to brutality, they are also the rhythmic undulations to wash away my coarse outer layers. I am now rewriting my truths that rigor mortis can still transform into my resurrection.