This Is The End

It’s a peculiar feeling when your walls are painted white once again and you see how many boxes seven years can fit into. The room gets cold, the person you’ve become packed neatly away. Stacked along the wall ready to be shipped to another state.

The bed is the last to go. A final night in a room with so many stories if only the corners would speak. Sounds of soft breath, laughter, tears. Now any movement echoes with cold air in a space that will still exist after I leave.

Fate. She’s a funny thing. A cruel thing. Delivering a person to me only days before I left. I was trying to control my heartbeat as we lied down on one of my final nights. He held my hand and kept telling me “for what it’s worth.”

For what it’s worth, I was trying to regulate my heartbeat so it didn’t echo off the walls. It could easily have woken my neighbors in a stunning show of timing and circumstance. The vibrations of my life shaking the townhouses with such violence of a heart so eager to have felt again.

A paraphrased encounter in a space that could allow so much more. But we only had the time we had, where dreams and choices followed you through the darkness. There were no more footnotes to be left in this place, merely a final pause. A pause to know there were always others to forget forever with.

I don’t know if he fell asleep, but I know my eyes refused to shut. There is a certain comfort in seeing the expiration date in something. A short stint before either person falls deep enough. The world spins away the moments, taking someone, something, anything away.

Fate can bring many types of love. I think there is merit in a space you create where it might not exist outside of it. My boxed up room held love and comfort for distraught tears and human connection. It allowed insecurity, hope, trust in more because you are what you create. This room offered solace during the trials and errors of my friends and I becoming adults. A respite from emotions, where we felt safe to cry in the dark.

There, for the first time lying with him I wasn’t worried about anything. I didn’t think about what’s next, where my words and pieces would land. I didn’t think of who will be down my path or if our souls were meant to collide again. But I did know, that for once, if this was all it was to be, it would have been enough. A reminder I could feel, we could feel together. Fate’s fingers intertwined with mine, or his did, or hers. Our breathing echoed off the walls and we knew we weren’t alone.