(CREATIVE NONFICTION)
SOMETIMES I TALK TO YOU WHEN YOU AREN'T AROUND
LILLIAN SMITH
SOMETIMES I TALK TO YOU WHEN YOU AREN'T AROUND
LILLIAN SMITH
Sometimes I talk to you when you aren’t around. I say, the bed is too big without you.
I roll around awake for several hours, trying to position myself accordingly to fill the space, your space, digging through the sheets and pillows looking for you and your scent— only to find something that isn’t there.
I wake up to mascara stained sheets, —as though I’ve poured my heart out to you throughout the night, and they are the remnants of our conversation.
Sometimes, I say things like, I wish you weren’t as far as this distance. I wish you were as close as I felt, and as present as my stained sheets. Sometimes I beg for you to linger like the feeling after a weekend spent together— the sticky smell of our love still etched on my skin. Sometimes I cry and don’t know what to say at all. Sometimes I cry and I do. Sometimes it pours out of me along with the tears, but too muddled up to make any sense. Sometimes I look at your photos and feel as though you're a ghost existing in another place that I can no longer have.
I miss all the little things—- like watching you pick out a tie, and watching you shave, and seeing you and that face you make when fiercely cooking bacon. Things that exist now only in my memory. A place that seems too far for me to touch and to hold.
If you were here, I would say come lie next to me, it’s early. We have hours to go. I can’t sleep, come hold me till I fall asleep.
You would come hold me, like you always do, and then you would quietly get up and go watch TV, and draw until you get tired, and then fall asleep on the couch, crawling into bed beside me at five a.m. because the sofa cushions gave you a backache.
It’s since you aren’t here that I'm writing to my memory of you. And now I've compiled endless letters and vowels that altogether form wordy stringed envelopes of my heartache, all of them postcards wrapped tightly and sent to the returned address that accounts for nothings and somethings, that forms a record of the time passed and helps me to remember some person that I once loved.
I roll around awake for several hours, trying to position myself accordingly to fill the space, your space, digging through the sheets and pillows looking for you and your scent— only to find something that isn’t there.
I wake up to mascara stained sheets, —as though I’ve poured my heart out to you throughout the night, and they are the remnants of our conversation.
Sometimes, I say things like, I wish you weren’t as far as this distance. I wish you were as close as I felt, and as present as my stained sheets. Sometimes I beg for you to linger like the feeling after a weekend spent together— the sticky smell of our love still etched on my skin. Sometimes I cry and don’t know what to say at all. Sometimes I cry and I do. Sometimes it pours out of me along with the tears, but too muddled up to make any sense. Sometimes I look at your photos and feel as though you're a ghost existing in another place that I can no longer have.
I miss all the little things—- like watching you pick out a tie, and watching you shave, and seeing you and that face you make when fiercely cooking bacon. Things that exist now only in my memory. A place that seems too far for me to touch and to hold.
If you were here, I would say come lie next to me, it’s early. We have hours to go. I can’t sleep, come hold me till I fall asleep.
You would come hold me, like you always do, and then you would quietly get up and go watch TV, and draw until you get tired, and then fall asleep on the couch, crawling into bed beside me at five a.m. because the sofa cushions gave you a backache.
It’s since you aren’t here that I'm writing to my memory of you. And now I've compiled endless letters and vowels that altogether form wordy stringed envelopes of my heartache, all of them postcards wrapped tightly and sent to the returned address that accounts for nothings and somethings, that forms a record of the time passed and helps me to remember some person that I once loved.
Lillian Smith