Poetry / The Truth About Distance And Darkness
Tonight was a cold darkness that you would have appreciated. Even though the numbness would have run through your fingers and you would have hated how your face would become numb and flushed from the bitter cold wind. You would stay out there much longer than I did. I walked so calmly across the sidewalk and the lightly snow covered grass, just thinking about how you would have described the way a night like this would make you believe. I can just imagine how you would have been walking beside me with your low cut converse shoes, a black hooded sweatshirt barely revealing a band tee shirt underneath, tight jeans, and your dirty blond hair. You always spoke slowly with concern and admiration that I by no means ever wanted to let go. As we would walk on nights just like this, you would tell me to never look behind me, but to look forward, even when I was walking away from you. So I did and I trusted you, I believed in you and even myself for those split seconds. And that is all those moments were for you and I, in the grand scheme of our separate forevers, we were just seconds, split seconds.
Winter always makes me think of you. The cold consumes my room and it’s hard to sleep, so I don’t. I take drives straight through the city; from the expressway I can see everything. I’ve always loved how the lights shape the skyline and the way this city screams your name in middle of the night. Besides gunshots, shrieking cars, and the usual city party scene, I can still hear our soundtrack among dimming streetlights. We spent most of our split seconds tucked away in run down rock venues, thrifty record stores and elitist coffee shops across this god-awful town. There were times we would just sit on the sidewalk, contemplating everything life had in front of us. We took drives; made wrong turns on purpose but in our split seconds, nothing else mattered.
I spent that summer alone. It was hard to get over the fear of traveling into city unaccompanied. I had no easing into the process; we were together until the night you left. I brace myself for the uneasy adventure, I’m still barely used to the idea. While down there I tend to run into old friends at the most inconvenient of times and on the worst of all days, but I smile at them anyway. They usually throw in the standard questions encompassed around you into our brief conversation. I try to dodge them the best I can without slipping into denial and hindsight. But then I slip into it anyway when I am alone.
The night you left for the last time, for one of your firsts, you said goodbye without words within your dark brown eyes. I couldn’t help but notice how lightly packed your knapsack was behind your driver seat. You always explained how the cold would rush through your bones…how you felt older than your days; those minutes and seconds that society had based your age around. I was the same way; I had always been the same way. We had been intertwined since the day we met; we were warriors against distance with very little fear and an invincible mindset.
Winter has never felt the same since that day. The day we never talk about, we barely even mention it in passing conversation with friends. I just refer it to it as: the night that changed everything. It changed the way I thought, the way I feel, and even the way I act. My solid priorities slipped away from me, my goals became meaningless and my actions, well they took a downward spiral to become irrational and thoughtless. I never thought of myself as a bitch or a careless person. I thrived off of caring for others; the last thing on my mind was my own personal gain or feelings. I just wanted you to stay and you didn’t. But I just assume you referred to it as the night before you left for tour, and nothing more.
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This is interesting. I would like to see this developed a bit more, because right now, there is something lacking. It lacks a driving force behind it. It only moves because you are reading to get to the end, not so much to read to see what happens. This would be a good introduction into perhaps a short story about the narrator, and then, in that context, it would be much more effective.
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I feel that I accidentally picked up your letter to your girlfriend and read it.
I feel from your words that this person was very special and meant a lot..maybe even more after she left..seems she was on a “mission” and you really miss them.
I like the way you express your time with them in”seconds” and remember the “little things”..those are the ties that bind.I feel the pain of your separation. Poets make others feel with their words..you did
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