lucky

Photo by: Storm Kimble Title: SunFroHer Medium: Digital

Sometimes I still want you.

I can’t even fully remember what you look like. Your hair is there, your height. Everything else is obscured. Like you’re sitting behind a frosted window separated from me by the barrier I tried to put up between us.

You crept in like the first hints of nausea. The inkling of a feeling, deep in my stomach and at the back of my throat.

I resisted at first, not wanting your voice or your eyes to mean something to me, to permeate the part of my brain that warned me about you, turning off whatever mechanism produces reason.

After a while, I let you linger, letting you seep into me during class and then stay there for the walk back home.

I looked at the trees as the cool weather began to ravish them. I looked at the cars passing through campus. I looked at my feet as they hit the ground or my arms as they swung with my strides, and I thought of you.

I changed my outfits, ripping through my closet, cursing the shirt I once loved or the sweater my mother had gifted me.

I looked for anything. Numbers that made patterns or songs that would come on when I hit shuffle. I looked for colors of birds and hidden symbols in puddles after it rained. I voiced prayers in the shower, urging whatever was above to send you to me.