FaceTiming with My Ex...

We talked for what seemed to fit within a sports game.

Looking at my ex-girlfriend through the lens of a phone camera was like putting on for an interview, for some foreign role in some company I'd always dreamed of working for.

An interview that was equal parts awkward and intimidating.

We looked at the digital composites of one another and asked all the right questions, diverted our eyes at the right times to the right spaces on the walls around us.

I wondered if she'd met someone new. I wondered what the inside of her new place looked like, what it smelled like.

I wished, in that moment, that I could test something of hers, see if she smelled the same.

See if her smell still made my body react as it once did.

Melting into to earth, it felt like. It always felt like melting into the earth.

Borderline biological, the effect it had. Physiological, whatever word my make sense of the intensity of it.

She asked me about my work, to which I replied and fought every ping in my body that told me to tell her all the good.

In these moments we were putting on the strangest performance of our lifetimes.

It felt like a blanket in the summer,

an agonizing need to rip at all the things keeping us from reality.

- iamqwnie