to you the prettiest cloud in the dark misty sky
I haven't spoken to anyone in weeks, and I don't think anyone has noticed enough to ask anymore; I spend most of my days in my room with the curtains half closed, brushing and rebraiding my hair whenever my hands begin to shake, because there is something comforting about having a small thing I can undo and do again, something that doesn't disappear no matter how many times I pull it apart. Your face is everywhere here, not in photographs, because I was afraid photographs would eventually feel unfamiliar, but in the pages of my notebooks, where I have drawn you so many times that the shape of your eyes has become something my hands remember better than my mind does. I draw you from memory every night, and every night something is wrong; sometimes your smile is too wide, sometimes your eyes look like a stranger's, sometimes I forget the exact shape of your mouth and sit there with the pencil hovering over the page, terrified that this is how forgetting begins, quietly, with one little detail that I can no longer return to.
I wonder what you would think if you could see me now, sitting on the floor with my hair falling over my shoulders, surrounded by half-finished drawings of the face I am terrified of losing, while the rest of the world keeps knocking softly at a door I haven't opened in a very long time. I don't answer them because I don't know how to explain that talking about you makes you feel less real somehow, as though saying your name aloud will turn you into a story instead of the person who used to sit beside me, and I would rather keep you here in the silence where I can still pretend that I know you. So I keep drawing, and I keep braiding my hair, and I keep filling page after page with your eyes, your hands, the little crease beside your mouth when you smiled, trying to make something permanent out of a memory that refuses to stay still, because if I can draw you perfectly just once, perhaps I can finally close the notebook and believe that I have saved you somewhere.
for dear : @saddestberie
