02 July 2018

A Book In The Dust

The books she gave me gather dust in my apartment. I don't know where her letters are. The few pictures we took together are backed-up in a cloud somewhere, buried in time and digital space.

Now that the dust has settled, there is no friendship to speak of.

There is, instead, a vacuum: a space she left that is no longer shaped like her. It's akin to the scars left when one has their wisdom teeth removed: spaces that can no longer accommodate anything but themselves. People talk about the holes that lovers leave in their lives, but they're not connected to much of anything. They do not require repair. They are wells of memory slowly going dry with whatever remnants becoming covered with dust. They are locked and windowless rooms. 

I hear nothing of her, though occasionally a photo of her – usually years old – will come across my radar and all I can confess is that she looks a little like someone I thought I knew once; someone that I loved, someone whose life once seemed hopelessly entangled in mine, someone I once imagined a future with. Someone who now seems to me less than a stranger, someone who is now a book in the dust, made of silence and nothing more: a book closed and not to be opened, perhaps not forever, but at least not for now. 

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