“Some loves don’t end, they just run out of places to go, and so they sit—quietly collapsing under their own weight.”
me and maybe you.
I’m hiding behind words again because the television saw through me, and reading is just another trick to get my eyelids to surrender. At my age, closing them is no small gamble — there’s no certainty they’ll open on my terms. That’s the thing about fate: you can tempt it, or you can just meet it halfway and let it carry you the rest of the way down.
I called you after staring at the text you sent this morning — a novel in the shape of a message. Too long to answer honestly, too loaded to ignore without looking like I’m the villain. I dialed, half-hoping to diffuse whatever spark was smoldering between us, but you gave me voicemail instead. I left a message that was supposed to sound like I didn’t care too much, but still cared enough, the way a hostage negotiator tries to convince both sides they’re in control.
I found an old piece I’d written you back when we still touched each other like it mattered. Raunchy enough to make me read it twice, wondering if it was nostalgia or just deprivation. I decided it was beautifully written. At the time, it was true — the sex, the tenderness, all of it. Now, after nearly six years, truth feels more like a vandalized monument than a foundation.
We aren’t nice anymore. We don’t touch. I’ve repeated that truth so many times it’s become a kind of broken prayer — dangerous to say out loud because I don’t want to hand you the weapon you might keep loaded, just in case. It’s the “WarGames” ending — no winners, just the understanding that some games can’t be played without ending everything.
The keyboard clicks under my fingers like a telegraph from a sinking ship, my laziest self sending it off to be polished by some binary god who can outwrite me without ever breaking a sweat. I’ll resent it, the way a man resents his executioner for being more efficient than the disease would have been.
But then you appear in my head again, as you do, and I start inventorying all the ways I’ve tried. All the times I’ve come up empty. There’s a sharper kind of hurt in that now, the kind that suggests it might be better if I just stopped typing, stopped thinking, stopped trying to fix what rots quietly in the dark. But that’s why I started typing in the first place — because I can’t stand the rot without pretending I have tools.
The answers don’t arrive. They never do. Still, I keep going, convincing myself the day will pull itself together before the sun folds into the horizon and we have to do this whole thing again tomorrow.
So where are you? Why can’t you feel the shape of my need in the silence I’ve been holding all day? I needed you the way a drowning man needs the idea of a rope — not the rope itself, just the knowledge it might still exist. I wished I could be one of your students, the ones who get the extra five minutes you’ve stopped giving me after six years of my best effort.
Soon you’ll go for your walk, and I’ll wrestle with sleep until it pins me, feeding me nightmares that pretend to be metaphors for what’s happening in daylight. I’ll wake from them relieved, only to realize the “real” is just a cleaner, quieter version of the same thing.
BB Grey--musings 
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