Mornings of a Perfect Delusion

07/28/21

If it weren't so nostalgic it would be almost comedic how my dreams conjure you in ways my conscious mind no longer can. The outline of your shoulders, jaw, and the way my hands used to fit so comfortably around the contours of your face. Your voice and your laugh, sounds that were lost to me a long time ago; no matter how hard my heart tried to hold onto them, time had other plans.

These precious old simplicities that have long become blurs in my conscious memory. Some mornings, against my better judgement, I fight to remain in that tiny space between slumber and the beginning of a new day. Between delusion and reality. The fraction of time where I still believe I will find you when I reach across the bed. Where I can comfortably relax into the lies that things could have been any different. That I could have loved you more, or less; better or differently, when in reality, I never could have made you stay.

But these mornings are perfectly painful moments of delusion where I can lie to myself about it all. Evade the guilt and shame I feel from my inability to leave you in the past. It's a fraction of time where I can exist in a place I don't have to battle my heart in a never-ending war to dim your memory. An instant where I don't have to remind myself that I'm remembering us both as we were; as the people we used to be. Perpetually trying to rid myself of the foolish belief that the person I loved and the person I was, are frozen in time, rather than washed away in the imminent tides of change. I try to slow time, to absorb every second I'm given; for just like all traces of you, these too will eventually fade.