"King's Dead" by Kendrick Lamar

I just want to see your face. I run from you because I’m scared you’ll reject me again. Reject my presence. Reject my friendship, like a small envelope from your first choice university. You’ve cast me out, far away from where you are, like a lost sailor and a dinghy in the middle of the Caribbean. The pain I feel from the loss of you is acute, and sharp, like the tips of bone in a compact fracture that punctured and broke through skin. I just want to see your face. I feel as though I can barely remember what you look like, akin to a movie you saw long ago, which you remember the essence of, the story, the plot, but have forgotten the actors and actresses who played the characters you love. Lately I’ve been wondering how it would feel to hug you, to wrap my arms around you and just breathe it in, like smudging every jar in Walmart’s candle section and cramming your nose up to the perforated plastic on the cheaper ones to get a whiff. I didn’t know how much I liked you, until you pulled away, like not realizing how much of your diet is carbs until you decide not to eat them and thereafter realize you’re unwittingly addicted to bread. I didn’t know I would miss you this much, until I did. There are plenty of stretches of time where you don’t cross my mind, like driving home on autopilot, mind anywhere but the road, but when you do, I’m stricken, in my head and in my heart in my heart, a sinking feeling that is echoed in my stomach and reverberates through my actual bones, like your heart in your mouth on Doctor Doom’s Fear Fall drop coaster in Universal Studios.

I keep coming back to this, but Jesus H. Christ I miss you. I miss you. I miss your mother if I’m being honest. I can barely meet her eyes these days. I honestly feel raw and exposed under her sweet, kind gaze. I feel scared and small when I see her. Like I’m somehow missing this obvious terrible truth that I’m really just a silly little girl who liked a boyish man who would never ever feel the same. I keep coming back to this, I keep writing this, like writing, “I must not tell lies,” down a hundred times on paper, the words burned into the back of my mind, practically sliced into my flesh. I miss you. I just want to see your face.