what we could’ve been

“… But, darling can’t you see? There’s no one more important to me, Baby, can’t you see through me?” - Donny Hathaway

i don’t know why i’m still awake

the rain’s been hitting the window for hours now and i just let it. don’t even check the time anymore. just lay here with my arms behind my head staring at nothing, thinking about everything, and somehow it all comes back to you. always comes back to you.

lightning just split the sky open and i didn’t even blink. that’s how i know something’s wrong with me. that’s how i know you did something to me that i haven’t fully named yet.

i remember the first time i really looked at you. not glanced. looked. the way your skin caught light like it had a conversation with it. that warm lightskin glow against my darkness and i swear to God it felt like something tectonic. like the universe was showing off. like it took its time with us specifically and we had the audacity to waste it.

black love is a different kind of beautiful and i don’t think either of us appreciated that enough whilst we were inside of it. we were art that forgot it was hanging in a gallery. just existed without reverence.

you used to sleep on my chest and i’d stay awake just to feel your breathing. stupid, innit. sacrificing sleep just to be conscious for something i thought would last. Donny Hathaway’s playing somewhere in my head right now, that ache he carries in his voice, that i love you that sounds like it’s already grieving itself, and i finally understand what he was singing about. he was singing about this. about you. about whatever the hell this is that i’m still carrying at whatever past midnight this is.

i think about your hands a lot. is that strange. probably strange. but your hands, the way they’d find me in the dark without hesitation, like your body knew where i was before your mind caught up. that kind of intimacy doesn’t come around often. that’s the shit they don’t warn you about. not the love, the “familiarity”.

the way someone can learn the geography of you and then just… leave. take the map with them.

and now i’m unmapped. wandering around myself.

Luther’s on now in my head, seamlessly, the way grief transitions without asking permission, and he’s doing that thing where his voice drops and it stops being music and becomes something closer to confession, and i want to confess that i’m still not over the way you smelled. that’s embarrassing. i’m embarrassed by myself right now laying here in the dark confessing to a ceiling that your scent is still somewhere in my memory doing damage.

i want to confess that the last time we were in bed together i knew it was the last time and i didn’t say anything. just held you a little tighter. memorised the weight of you. selfish and cowardly and so deeply human that i hate myself for it.

we could’ve been something they wrote about.

i’m serious. the kind of love that becomes a reference point. “remember them?” yeah. like that. the kind people see and unconsciously adjust their standards. we had the raw material for something generational and we just. didn’t build it. stood at the site with all the bricks and argued about the blueprint until it was too late and someone called off the project.

another lightning strike. not a flinch, my nervous system has fully clocked out and left my body to figure this out alone which feels poetic and also deeply unfair.

i wonder if you’re awake right now. i wonder if the storm reached you. i wonder if you’re laid up next to somebody who doesn’t deserve you yet and learning them the way you learned me and i want to be evolved enough to want your happiness but i’m not there yet. i’m not there. i’m here. on this ceiling. in this dark. in this particular thunder.

the things i would do to have one more conversation that goes nowhere and lasts for hours. one more morning where nothing’s decided yet. one more moment where your leg’s thrown over mine and the day hasn’t made its demands and we’re just two people suspended in the warmth of each other, not yet required to be anything other than together.

i would trade so much for that. that’s the part that gets me. not the grand gestures. the ordinary suspended moments. the “before the world starts” moments

Drake said something once that i didn’t understand until now, something about loving someone through their sharpest edges and still coming up empty, and i used to think that was weakness dressed up as depth but now i think he just loved somebody real and real love will humble you. real love will have you staring at ceilings during thunderstorms, unmoved by lightning, writing eulogies for something that technically still exists somewhere in the world, just not for you, not anymore, not like that.

i think what kills me most is that we didn’t implode. no explosion. no villain. just two people who let the distance grow a centimetre at a time until one day we looked up and couldn’t see each other across it. mundane destruction. the slow leak rather than the burst pipe.

and i keep thinking if i’d just. if we’d just.

but that sentence doesn’t end well no matter how i finish it.

your lightskin in the dark of my room. my dark skin in the light of yours. we were balance. we were contrast that made sense of itself. i don’t know if you knew that. i don’t know if you looked at us together and felt what i felt, that specific pride, that “look what we are” quiet arrogance that comes from standing next to someone who completes the visual poetry of you.

i hope you knew that. i hope i said it enough. i probably didn’t. i was always better at feeling things than translating them and you deserved someone fluent.

the storm’s quieting now. slowly. the way everything ends, gradually then all at once.

i’m still here though.

still eyes on this ceiling.

still yours in the ways that don’t transfer.

still thinking abut what we could’ve been if we’d been braver, softer, more present, less proud

still thinking.

still