I Miss You

Not being with you is hard, even though it’s been years of this routine, of us living cities, oceans, worlds apart. I miss you every day, and I think about you more than you would care to know. It’s supposed to get easier because you know, time, the great healer, is on our side, but somehow the more time goes by the harder it feels to be away.

I miss you because you know me best. You know the undulations of my temperament, what it means when I say this and that or so and so, and I never have to explain myself because you know just how to respond. I’ve never felt so comfortable as myself as when I’m with you, and I’m afraid that all this distance has made things change, made us different, that maybe you can’t see me as clearly any more.

What am I talking about? Of course this time and space has changed us. Each experience we’ve had without each other is another inch of distance between us, of us growing in opposite directions so that maybe we won’t quite innately know one another the next time we meet. But how can you ever stop instinctively knowing someone you love so well?

It’s lonely without you. Although I don’t feel so lonely as I do alone. When there’s no one to laugh with (and I don’t mean chuckle, I mean laugh until we think we might die from it), no one to cry with (and I don’t mean a few tears, I mean guttural animal wailing), no one to understand just exactly what’s happening in my head just by being in the same room. I miss that.

Sometimes I think that as I get older, the less likely I am of having another you, and the more likely I am of not having you at all. It’s so easy when you’re young to pour your soul into someone else’s, to spend every second studying them, getting to know them, being able to read them like a giant flashing neon sign, even when they seem blurred and erratic to everyone else. I get mad that you’re so far away, or that I’m so far away, and that we’re not in the same place, just being together.

My favorite times were always the quietest. Being near you in a silent knowing where for hours neither would say a thing, just eat whatever breakfast or read whatever newspaper was there, and pass the time as though we were singular, but knowing that we were plural. I miss our plurality. I miss knowing that your knowing made me safe. I miss your arms, your feet, your smell. I miss you right down to the smallest blackhead on your nose. I miss you, I miss you, I wish I knew when or if I could see you again, I wish it would be just the same as it always was.