You will not find me, probably not in the body that you will discover off coast, floating after the storm like a misplaced reminder, biding its unholy time until it is found by strangers who will never know my name, for this body, the very same one that pressed itself against yours in search of warmth on countless early mornings when the world was cold and our hearts more so, has become nothing more than a shell of the past, a breath short of the future it could have had, for life without you is no life at all, like an ocean thirsty for water: devoid of depth, exposed in its emptiness, barren. I have rented this body for years on end, and the day will come when I will have to return it in its sorry state, crushed by expectations falling short, collapsing from their own weight as swift as your departure.
As I choke in my melancholy like stones racing down my throat, you will no longer hear from me, and my silence will be forever yours to own. On that day and the ones to follow, treasure it like a secret because you will carry it with you until the end, like a child never to be born, the same way that I carry yours with me in nowhere land. Where it is, I wish I could say, because you were once every north and east and west and south that I took, navigating life with the steady assurance that you are where I will be, but the day I lose you will be the day I lose every sense of direction. I can go anywhere but it will be as if I have only left, never truly arriving, a perpetual solitary journey with no word to keep me company, no voice to tell me I’m finally home.
You will not find me in the streets where I used to seek refuge from the cruel life that once held this flesh hostage. These concrete arteries that gut the city, witness to a thousand stories including mine, seeping with the kind of inanimate forgiveness that only the streets could give, they are probably the only friends I have ever known but have abandoned me all the same at the final moment, so please don’t look for me there. No one, even nothing, stays forever. This is probably the only gospel truth I will tuck in my heart, retrieving it like a card kept in my pocket whenever things get too comfortable so that I may never again mistake complacency for assurance, for the same reason that a street cannot go by different names: we get lost when we do not know where we stand.
I will rest under the carpet of stars, my back on moist grass as I lay humbled by the eternal cosmos, my eyes folding from the weight of sadness, making them surrender and close after having acquainted themselves with happiness from years of tender innocence, this time perhaps finding comfort in perpetual night, never to wish for the sun again as though there is nothing left to see. But darkness can be beautiful. It relies on nothing but absence, finding sufficiency in whatever it lacks, making itself known by the shadows it casts far and wide. Please don’t search for me even if we continue to share the same evening sky above our heads, for it is enough that the darkness that separates us is the same one that binds us. We will both find comfort in what we cannot see, because time and again what we do not know will not make us cry.
Please don’t hope for my return, for I have scraped my heart on solid ground on summer nights too many to count, standing in the line of fire with a misguided sense of courage, wielding my heart like a pistol only to be made its first attrition. Because you will be the one to leave, the heaviest of chests will be mine to endure. I will walk away, too, but know that with each stride my heart will sink from its weight and I will have to drag them by my feet once they reach the ground. The distance between where we will make our final stand, the very last conversation we will ever have in our short lives, and where I intend to go will be the longest exit I will ever take. It might never end.
The day I lose you will be the day I will have the longest sleep, one that you have wished for me to take since the day we first talked. It will be the only consolation I will ever have, so please don’t look for me.