Tuesday untying.

Somewhere, right now, you’re coming undone. Your shoes, and then your shirt, and then your pants. Your thoughts, your mental list of necessities that you set out to accomplish today… all of them, everything, unraveling. I didn’t mean to think about you today, but it’s 10:30pm on the west coast and if we lived over there, you would just be getting home from work, taking off your pants. Sometimes, the digits on the clock like to remind me of the date of our first kiss, and sometimes I throw stuff at it in hopes that it’ll tick faster, that time would make an exception for me, or that the springs would just… unravel. Something, anything. But never such luck. In my perfect world, I would hope that every Thursday, your car wouldn’t start and if it did, it would cut off right when the light turns green at that traffic signal by your house. And if it so happened to start after that, I would hope that it would be hot outside and your air stopped working and every time you put your blinkers on, your windshield wipers would follow suit. I hope that you meet a pretty girl at the gas station and when you ask for her number, she tells you that she aggressively believes in the Law of Attraction and that for the past two weeks, she’s been putting awful vibes into the universe, so naturally, you must be the personification of all the negativity that she’s relinquished and as a part of a 6-day soul cleanse that she’s on, it would be best to not talk to you. Or anyone else like you… and I hope you walk away confused. Unravelled, if you will. I hope that all your friends stop talking to you, too. And that your junior high acne comes back. I never vocalize this, though. Whenever someone asks about you, I always say I wish you nothing but the best, and love, and happiness, and wealth, and all those other cliché things that bitter, heartbroken people spew out after breakups to ensure that good karma comes back to them. Wouldn’t wanna end up like the hypothetical gas station girl.

You made me want to do things. Little things that I should’ve done but never had the motivation to do until I held your hand for the first time. Like put on lotion everyday even when I wore pants. I color-coordinated my underwear because you always like the pink ones, and I was nice when you were here. I held the door open for people. I didn’t care about your lack of subject-verb agreement because even when you messed it up, I just liked that you weren’t trying to be anyone other than yourself.

I didn’t mean to make this about me, though. The selfishness comes secondhand nowadays. But since we’re taking about me, I should mention that I only wanted to make you happy… and that’s not the bitter, cliché, heartbroken karma insurance. It’s really me. It’s the 4am me when I would talk to a half-asleep you about what I wanted to name our kids and what I was gonna get you for Christmas because I knew you didn’t hear me. Anyway, this is the honest me. I just wanted you happy. And since we’re still talking about me, I miss you. And I have meet-and-greet passes to The Lonely Show that never expire, and it rolls into town every night. The band loves to play to my heart.

I don’t now where you are, or if you’ve heard the isolated tune, or if the gas station girl fell victim to the random inflections in your voice like I did and decided to take a chance on you anyway. And maybe her hands are rubbing your chest tonight, wherever you are. And maybe she picks up your pants and your shirt while you tell her the list of necessities you accomplished today. And maybe lonely has never touched you in a way that would make you unravel in a notebook in the early morning hours. It’s a strange feeling, an isolated one, and at the end of my days, I always end up telling the shower walls the things I used to tell you.