The Blood & The Bones

You sent me a video of you once and at the end of it you said I love you.

And if there was a way to track how many times I’ve watched those last 6 seconds I’d likely be mortified by the number.

You ran yourself ragged most days. You worked so much. I didn’t get to hear your voice a lot and there were hundreds of miles between us.. Most days I thought of you constantly and I missed you always.

When we couldn’t talk, I’d replay that part of the video. I would watch your eyes as you said it. It was so soothing to me. Just watching your face and seeing those words slip from your lips like we’d been saying this to each other for a hundred years. It seemed so natural yet so overflowing with meaning for just three little words. I can’t describe it. Me, the girl who can illustrate anything with words. Yet I cannot find them to explain how it would give me butterflies and calm me simultaneously and how I can’t remember ever feeling that way when any other man said I love you.

And now that you’re gone it took me awhile but, eventually, I deleted everything I’d saved from you over the last year. The photos, the videos, the screenshots of texts that I loved to read when I was missing you. I am always missing you.

But that one, even though it tears me apart and makes it hard to breathe when I watch it, that one I can’t get rid of. I guess loving you was always like that too.

You still have a hold on me so tight. It’s like a vice grip. I know you’ve moved on. I know I am not on your mind. But, I still love you as intensely now as I did the last time I said it. And yet there is so much doubt as to whether any of it was actually even real for you.

And I know I must go on forever without you but if I could change just one thing, it would be that. It would be to rid myself of this aching, restless doubt so that I could look back on our time together and not see the hurt and the lies and solely see how you were the only man who ever made me feel that way when he said I love you.

LL