To M,

They aren’t magic string, but they are strong. They hold me, they enwrap me and they never go loose. I listen to the drunken lyrics in the background: I want to fall in love. I breathe through them as my lips carelessly drop out words, words which a sober me cannot utter: I need to fall out of love. I need to fall out of love with my past; it holds me ever so tightly that any possibility of the future becomes undoable. This place is so you, M. And this boy is so you. He holds her, my best friend from years ago, and I look over at her, just as she must have looked over at us, wishing for something as good. She has it now, I am the lost one, I am the one wishing for something as good. Why do relationships have to be this hard? What an easy question; because the only thing harder is being alone. To me you are the present ‘cause we never had an end. I miss you, I believe in you, and what’s worse, I believe in us. I believe that if you were here then we wouldn’t just be good, we would be great, we would be fireworks and love and magic, we’d fall in love all over again and our past would be our fortress. I am the girl who lives for the past, the future is bleak. I live for my fourteen year old self, for five years ago. Today doesn’t exist because today isn’t something I want for to exist. I want five years ago back. M, how can the world not hold magic string for people? How is it that for me you’re still here, for me there is still an us, there is still that chance, that unlikely, that crazy, yet beautiful possibility, the chance out of a trillion that things might still work out? Am I broken, why is the past still here for me? Why is it that I’m wishing, praying, pleading, that it’s still here for you too? Except no one else does this, no one else punishes themselves like this, forcing the past down their own throats for another chance, never, ever, letting go.

We never had a big finale, we never had any sort of end. We are like a guitar string ripped in half in the middle of the song. M, tonight I would have given anything for you to walk through the door and make the last five years obliterate into space. You’d kiss me on the forehead and everything would have been said, I would have known that this time was necessary to keep us alive, that back then we were far too stubborn to survive, but that now, now there is not a thing that could tear us apart. Because this is the way things were always meant to be for us, this would be our ending and our beginning. These would be our fireworks, your lips pressed against my forehead. Is there anything you would have given? Is there anything at all?