The Agony of Wonder

Why I Smiled?

You probably accounted for a large portion of my smiling at one point in my life. Sometimes even though you are certainly gone, I can still feel you, sitting right behind me, smiling... not who you are now. Now you'd probably say that's creepy then go on about creepiness is only creepy if you make it creepy and it's just another definition. But the you I still feel is a different you, one who was warm and sure and a little bit mysterious.

Maybe I smiled because I felt like I had found my person, someone I could talk to about anything, my soulmate. I didn't take that as a joke or whatever you meant when you said it. I took that as a promise. You said when you saw me for the first time, performing at Urban Artifact months before you'd ever really talked to me, you thought I could be your soulmate. That's powerful.

Did you think that when you saw her for the first time in school? Was she your real soulmate? Did it cross your mind every time you saw her in the hallway? Or did you ever really mean the things you said?

You told me you lied, but about what? What was real? what was made up? what did you want all this time? You never pressured me into sex. You never got anything but attention and gifts. Is that what you wanted, attention? Or did you actually just want me at one time?

I used to smile because having you seemed so crazy that I couldn't believe that it was real. I thought I was living in a dream. But now it feels like a dream to imagine me ever having you. You have a way of changing into what seemed to be a whole new person with a different punchier, more teenage like personality, with this impressive coldness as if I never meant a damn thing to you. Whether it's real or acted, it's startling, like I've been closed off to a place I was always given access, like you changed the locks to your dusty old mansion and left me wandering the streets around it.

➴

Your majestic heart,

that big, scary, hairy beast I've tried to tame.

It roams alone

sitting on its own floating throne,

singing its own song

whispering jokes on the telephone.

I called it by its name

and held it by the throat,

but as it choked

it continued to gloat

about its new shoes

and other irrelevant old news,

leaving its dirty little footprints

on the back of my mind,

carving the topography

of my thought process in time.

It was a tyrant at best,

ruling my fragile little heart

that finally learned to grow some balls this fall.

I fall in and out of love every other eternity,

while you fall in and out of reality every other minute.