I know your eyes weren’t as glittery as I remember them to be. And that you didn’t make me laugh as hard as I think you did. Your hair may not have been as soft and your hands not as large and encompassing and I visualise them to be. You for sure didn’t have a laugh as perfect as my memory shows me to be and your hoodies probably weren’t as divine smelling as I’m guessing they were.
Because nostalgia is cruel. It gives you a glorified highlight reel of what you wanted it to be like not what it was.
So I can fantasise all I want about our facetimes until dawn,
But I still need to remember how groggy I felt the next day.
And I can keep silently fangirling about how tightly you hug,
But I need to remind myself of how much tighter my chest felt every time you brought her up.
I’ll still silently fangirl whenever I hear the sound I had set specifically for your texts,
But I need to acknowledge just how far my stomach dropped sometimes when I read them.
It is in reminding myself of the holistic experience, not just the shimmery, glossy moments, that keeps me walking the thin tight-rope of sanity and self-respect. You added so much good but also so much bleh. And I clutch this bleh, very close to my chest and gripped deep within my eternally manicured hands, in hopes of not getting swept away in the curly clouds of nostalgia.
Or maybe I’m being resentful and living in the past and am going to regret not calling you right now in about a year.
Oh, the inevitable cluelessness that comes with being 16!
Self-doubt comes as often as lectures from my mum about emptying the dishwasher. I feel like I’m learning to walk all over again, I’m trying to put one foot in front of the other and figure it out from there,
But I keep walking into pointy-edged furniture of cringe or rolling my ankles on toy trains of overwhelming newness or stepping on legos of constant and consistent failure.
I know, I have rationalised, I have come to a logical conclusion,
That my memories are completely and unequivocally an unreliable source, clouded with mushy feelings and foggy with rose-lensed desire.
But a small, minuscule, absolutely tiny part of me can’t help but think,
‘What if they’re not?
What if his voice was just as
decadent
and his laugh just as
Warm?
What if everything is precisely as you remember them to be?
What if then?’
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