Ending Situationships & Photos of Pressed Macroalgae (these are the things that fill my brain these days)
You tell our mutual friend that I am epiphytic to you. Like you tried to walk away from me that night, and I clung onto your arm, pulling you back to me. I remember no such thing happening. And if it had, dare I say, you used to like being pulled into me. A few weeks before this, and one table over, you held both my hands tightly over its gin-soaked surface and asked me why I changed the chain of my locket to a string of black yarn. You drunkenly blew me kisses through the glass of the window at The Local while I waited in the hour-long line outside. And when you slept over for the first time and we finally found it in ourselves to stop chatting and commit to our mutually said "goodnight," you put your arm around me and laced your fingers into mine.
I didn’t make you do these things. And when we talk about us, I don’t make you loosely deem me your girlfriend for the month. To me, the reason we fell into this relationshipy thing (whatever you wanna call it) isn’t because of what I did or what you said. To me, we fell into this because we had random, comfortable and sometimes intense feelings for one another. We fell into it like how you sometimes take the wrong exit on a highway. Or how a nose can just start bleeding if you are cold and sniffling in a rainstorm. We fell into this like how you accidentally knock something off of a shelf at the grocery store when reaching for the goldfish crackers. We fell into this like how, in your sleep, you somehow managed to wrap the cord of my heating pad around your neck. We fell into this through uncalculated moves, sleepy thrashes, a dangerous “go with the flow” attitude and our tendency to want to be around each other.
I don't think you acknowledge the depth of your feelings for me. You're defensive when talking "us" to the girl who introduced us last year. Your old roommate, the one I met on an abroad course in Berlin. She doesn’t say anything about you admitting that some part of you wanted to keep my green John Deere hoodie for at least the rest of the month. Tell me I wasn’t stringing together your sentences til they sounded like affections.
The night before we ended things, you called me your favourite thing. Am I remembering you right in this foggy memorial? Do you remember spilling this sticky sentiment? You said “Ah, my two favourite things,” meaning your cheap pitcher of horsepower beer and me. I feel like you don’t remember these little things. I feel like you would have understood my shock the next morning better if you did. You had a deck of cards with you, so I said, “Of course, your beer and your games,” you responded, “okay, my three favourite things.”
You come to my place for the last time a week before you leave Halifax for good, or until you're grown and decide that you belong on the east coast, more than you do the west one. We have matching two to three week old cold sores camping out in the corners where our lips meet. But that's all we have. That's all the proof of what we have been since March. I can’t squish my strung-together affections into the space you’ve left for me. So I don’t even try.
It's been real. It's been weird. No regrets?