to you, somewhere between the trees
i came into the jungle because I thought I needed to be somewhere you had never been, somewhere untouched by the rooms we shared and the streets that still remember our footsteps, but somehow you are here too, or at least I keep finding pieces of you everywhere I look; in the movement of the leaves, in the damp air against my skin, in the distant sound of water moving through the dark, and every time a branch breaks somewhere behind me I turn around with my heart already reaching for you, convinced that this time it will really be you standing there, smiling at me as though I have only been gone for an afternoon.
I have been crying so much that I don't know when I started, and now the tears feel almost ordinary, running down my face while I sit beneath these enormous trees with mud on my hands and your name caught somewhere in my throat. I keep talking to you because the silence here is too large to bear, telling you about the birds I can't name, the rain that came down so suddenly, the strange flowers growing beside the path, and sometimes I swear you answer me, not with words exactly, but with the rustling above me or the sound of footsteps disappearing into the undergrowth, and I know I should understand that it is only the jungle, only wind and water and my own exhausted mind trying desperately to put you somewhere I can still reach you.
but then the sun comes through the leaves in exactly the way you used to love, and for one impossible moment I see your face between the branches, so clear that I forget how to breathe, and I start walking toward you before I remember that you are gone, that there is no version of this world where you are waiting for me at the end of the path. Still, I follow the shape of you deeper into the trees, crying your name like if I say it enough times the jungle might finally give you back, and perhaps that is what I have become now, someone wandering through a world that keeps changing around them, looking for a person who exists only in the places where love has refused to leave.
tonight I will sit here until the rain comes again, and if I hear you beside me, I think I will let myself believe it, just for a little while, because I am tired of being the only one who knows that you are gone, and for one night I would rather be foolish enough to believe that when the leaves move behind me, it is you coming home.
for dear : @urcadence
