I have been thinking about you a lot lately. About the way we used to talk and the things we used to talk about. I loved the way you listened.
You always asked the right questions, without pretense or judgment.
Your voice was like velvet, deep and lush. And your laugh made my heart sing. The sound of you was one of the great pleasures of my life.
You often spoke without speaking, there is profound wisdom in that. You taught me that silence has a lot to say and that it is not always abusive. That it is not necessary to fill space with words. And that the body has a language all its own, especially when it is in close proximity to another.
My body told you things that I didn’t know she knew. She communicated desire, hunger, ecstasy, and contentment. She used signs and symbols, sound and wordlessness, stretches and shudders. She whispered secrets and declared surrender.
You reintroduced me to the parts of me that I had hidden.
I tried to shield myself from feeling too much, only to find that it was impossible to quarantine something that was so voluminous. My heart was not concerned with the risk of loving someone who wouldn’t stay.
Sometimes during long stretches of clarity, I begin to forget about us. But then I hear a song or smell a scent and it all comes rushing back again. The memories are brutally vivid and harshly void of accuracy. My mind was really good about filling in all the spots where your emotions were unavailable and pouring your presence into the holes left by your absence.
But time has a way of chiseling the truth out of fictionalized experiences. I can now see that you did not walk out on me… you set me free.
And I thank you 🙏🏾
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