The Poetic Verses of Your Being
For the past seventeen months, you have lived between the lines on unnamed documents saved in random folders on my cluttered desktop, reduced to words and rhymes that never seem to capture all of you yet I keep going because you’re always on my mind and while there are novels to be written about what you taught me, there are poetic verses of your being that will get lost in translation if I don’t recount them daily.
The shuffle of your footsteps as you skipped down the stairs, your flip-flops grazing over cemented floors.
The flick of your wrist when you got too excited and your fingers would snap against one another, a subtle soundtrack to your giddiness.
The way your head would always droop to the right if you fell asleep on the sofa even though we planned stay up all night watching trashy movies and eating trashier food.
The hand slipping into your pocket as you would broaden your chest and ask me to walk in front of you any time we were in a crowded space so that you could tower over me like a canopy of protection.
The thick bubble of smoke that would escape from your mouth every time you took a polite drag of my sloppily rolled joints.
The squint in your eyes every time the camera flash went off so your face is frozen uncomfortably in most of our pictures as kids.
The parenthesis curve of your back as you sat on the floor hugging your large knees and gently rocking back and forth to a melody only you could hear.
The different frequencies of your laugh – the higher the laugh, the redder your face, the tauter your skin, the lighter our hearts.
The hurricane-like entrance to every room, grabbing and pulling us towards you effortlessly.
The hurricane-like exit from this world, sweeping it clean and empty and silent.
All your little quirks that are mixed like secret ingredients in a dish I know the basic components of but it’s been fifteen months of me standing at the stove, stirring a pot, waiting for you to jump out but it keeps overflowing with inconsistencies and false memories so I tear out the pages of the calendar because the more time that goes on, the more of you I keep losing.