Why Are You Standing So Far Away?

Why are you standing so far away? I mean, I can still make you out through the ship smoke and snowscreen static—I’m just wondering, is all. Even when I’m not looking at you, I believe that you exist like I believe Greece or God exists, like I believe the killer in the closet exists, like I believe a meaning to life—well, you get it.

Why are you running so damn fast? I don’t ask where: I follow the napalm. I trace the burnt buildings and melted tarmac to guess at where you’ve wandered off to. Every morning I look up the weather in Montana just to sit here with the small unproven knowledge that you must have shivered when you stepped through the door today. I spot my name in a book you’ve read and nurse the glimmer of myself that must have died in your mind just as it arrived. Meanwhile, my existence sputters and creaks into rooms where people say they don’t know how to fix me while I throw up kerosene all over their clipboards.

Were you really entering a lift when you hung up? On your birthday I hang up streamers from hornet’s nest to hornet’s nest; come September, those things hover like the past in every corner. And I hope the magpies that crest my roof find yours to pass on my wishes, but you’d probably fight them off with a mop handle. Last month I walked into your favourite café and now I have a job, or something, which means I can now afford to think about you this much. This much, my hands are parallel and widening. Now you’re looking at me too, but in the way you look at a lapping cup you’re holding in both hands. In your eyes: the glint of the hunted. Or maybe that’s the glint of my reflection.

How did you pretend for all that time? Everyone in every room was talking about me right before I walked in, multiply by all the rooms I’ve ever walked in, subtract by all the rooms where there’s some inexplicable romance in your sweeping gaze right before you see me walk in. That’s a trap: you never see me, my body’s in the way. Five meters away, your voice through static asks me where I am, and I don’t know, I’m wherever these memories spit me out, from nondescript bar to nondescript hallway, filled with these people I pretend to care about, not you, never you. I see you in twenty years watching Arrested Development, counting the episodes to remind yourself when to pick up the kids from soccer. On a random Tuesday I realise I do not love you, but an ideal version of me would, so what these hands are stained with is not the blood of the lamb but the motor oil of something gone wrong.

Who am I kidding? It is blood, slicker than what runs down my dime-store dress-up wings. Not yours, by which I mean the blood, because maybe the wings are.

What did you mean by, well, everything? I scrutinise every message, even those whose contexts are eroded by years of irrelevance, trying to plot a graph of your perceptions of me through the subtexts I stuff into your taxidermied mouth. I employ your void as an excuse not to get better, because if I can blame something unsolvable I don’t even have to start trying. I keep my feelings in jars that were once for peaches, analysing what each one reveals about my character. I start every sentence with I and still claim this piece to be about you.

Are you my worst plot device yet? You’re on the cusp of a million things, cliffs and epiphanies and quarter-life haircuts. I find myself quoting Wuthering Heights and believing in souls and waiting for buses sans books or music, just staring out at the road, which is something I’ve only seen my father do when I’m realising my future looks like his twin brother. You know this film by heart: I’m at the part where I abandon all my nearby friends to choose you-from-afar, in every doomed lifetime. Your silhouette, through myopia and fog, for which I’d push past all the rose-bearing rom-com stars and love you too much to let you know I was there. But the daisies in the gravel are still bent in your direction.

Why are you standing so far away? At least part of why I write is because it’d be a shame for the literary canon to pass by without a passing mention of you. These words have you more than I ever will, because my best wishes depend on my distance. No, I’ll let you live even if it kills me, and here I am now with you at the wake, wearing the same clothes that you did on the plane. And in this recurring nightmare we both have buttons for eyes. But for now I’m sitting in the bleachers, dying strands of summer in my hair, choosing every day to believe a little more in ghosts. Anyway, 870 words to say you promised you’d text me when you got home and it’s been three years.