I don't even love you anymore

I don’t even love you anymore

Orange-flavored clouds slipping above us, melting into the setting sun. Soft velvet summer air in our lungs. The valley that raised us below, beneath the mountains we always talked about climbing; the landscape of our lives.

And there we are. Sweet and young and somehow both innocent and ruined in the same breath. Ruined by life, I guess. But innocent in love. Lying shoulder to shoulder on my old trampoline, laughing up at the sky, despite everything. That song fills my right ear and your left one through your battered earbuds, and we sing our own verses and shout through the chorus like we own the words. The sound of us drifts between the stalks of grass, across the fields between my house and anything else, picked up by a summer wind and swallowed by the evening.

And there we are. Sharing everything with the sky and each other. Calling ourselves tragic and hoping that makes us beautiful. We whisper poetry and sip each other’s bittersweet words.

God, I can’t get that taste out of my mouth.

And there we are.

They always told me I would grow out of that scene, grow out of our innocence and our ruin, grow out of you. Grow out of you like a child from an old, patched-up pair of jeans. Holes in the knees and love in the pockets. And they were right. It’s taken six years, two degrees, one start-up career and a happy marriage, but hell, have I grown. In true phoenix fashion, I have risen from our ruin. I am new without you.

And then that song plays. The first guitar cord sounds. I hear you in it like a soldier hears grenade blasts in 4th of July fireworks. My right ear starts ringing and the present spins away from me and suddenly I’m in that scene, the one I grew out of, watching the sun set with a grainy quality, like an old Hollywood movie reel.

And there we are.

It’s not that I miss you. There were sunsets, yes, but there were also wars. Sieges that laid waste to us. Soldiers don’t miss their battlefields, but I'm told they never really leave them either. Blood from my bullet wounds still lies somewhere on our no-man’s land, pieces of me still spattered in the dirt.

But movie stars miss the sets of their favorite films, and children miss the rust on their playgrounds. Soldiers, stars, and children; we never could decide what we were. Life made us soldiers and we liked to think we were stars, but in the end, I guess we were just kids who had to grow up too fast. Running from harsh hands and your parents’ screams and hiding from the monster in my head, and somewhere in between, finding time for love notes. Every once in a while, there was time to stargaze from the grass between the trenches.

And there we are.

I learned my lesson. I learned from you. I learned that the strongest feelings a person can have come during lightning storms and on sunrise beaches, and sometimes red flags feel a lot like butterflies when you don’t know the difference. You weren’t the one to show me beaches and butterflies, but I wouldn’t appreciate them like I do now if I had never been struck by you.

To this day, I don’t know if my heart has ever felt as much as it did when it stopped, frozen, caged between rattling bones, glowing and still. You hurt like hell, but damn was it a rush.

I still hear you screaming my name like your father screamed your mother’s, like you promised to our sky you never would.

I still hear you choke my name out somewhere between apologies, standing cold and gray on my front porch, begging me to save you one more time.

I still hear you whisper my name somewhere near the end, like you know that it’s coming, with your head in my lap and me staring over you at the valley we used to laugh at. There are dark wet spots on my jeans from your tears; I feel their chill seeping into my legs but I don’t move yet.

Soldiers don’t miss their battlefields, but they never really leave them either. Years later and in a moment I hear all of it, all of you in one guitar cord on the radio.

And there we are.

I don’t know why I’m writing all this. I don’t know what I feel, why I still feel anything about you. It isn’t love, it isn’t resentment. It isn’t good, it isn’t bad. It’s just there, like it always has been, lying shoulder-to-shoulder with you in the back of my mind. A cornerstone of my identity.

I’ve changed over the years. I’ve learned what love really is since you. True love. Honest love. Healthy love. What love should be. It should feel like sunlight through the cracks in your roof, filling the broken spaces instead of feeding them. It muzzles the monsters in your mind and shuts them back in the closet, locks the door, swallows the key. Love makes you the best of who you are, discovering new pieces of what you were meant to be every day. When he showed it to me, it was a different kind of warm. It was like igniting the fireplace inside my lungs, warming my heart back to life. Sweet and gentle, subtle and constant. Everything a lightning strike is not.

But despite all this, despite years and change and love and him, here I am, warm and whole and grown out of you, spilling our story onto a page.

One song did this to me. One song, one story, one person one lifetime ago, and grown up or not, I’m still hiding you between lines of poetry. I still weave in summer sunsets and velvet air, battlefields and bomb blasts, love notes and lightning strikes, song lyrics and broken apologies. All the threads that stitch me together. All the ashes that bore me into who I am.

I look in the mirror

And there we are.