Philosophical Determinism

I didn’t shower for a week.

I couldn’t wash you off of me.

Each bit of skin that a part of you had touched

Suspended there in time

As a physical, tangible thing to hold on to

When the rest of you was lost

I held onto your fingerprints and other memories of your DNA

Like some Victorian mourner

Clinging to a lock of hair

I am a broken amalgamation

Of everyone and everything that has ever happened to me

Some more than others

All good mosaics have large pieces

Have small pieces

Jagged and smooth

And then there are the pieces that are both

Large and small

Jagged and smooth

How are they both

There are many things we can never know

The structure of them is painted across my mind

A constellation that should be seen with clear eyes

Instead, locked away in a museum of the mind

How can one thing

One person

One piece

Be both

You are

A universal beauty residing in every fractal of your eye

A microcosm in your macrocosm

I wanted to consume it all

I watch my toddler with tired eyes

He tries to eat an apple, stubbornly refusing it to be cut up

He fumbles and falters and cries

I fumble and falter and cry

I wanted you whole

And instead I got little pieces

I could’ve stared into those eyes

Listened to those words spill out of your mouth

Run my fingers through your hair

Forever.

Truth is subjective

But that is my truth

A truth I will never realize

A truth that will never be realized

A truth that is unrequited

A truth that is as fleeting as any

Instead, I save pictures to my camera roll

I commit words to my memory

I read 22 pages of screenshots of our last interaction repeatedly

Clinging and clawing for finality

For things to hold on to

I hold a mirror for the truths I know

And the ones I don’t know too

But this is unnecessary.

Our souls are old

And our souls are familiar

My gratitude to the tram lines.

It was always determined.

I could not stop

The crash.

“We have not long to love

Light does not stay

We have not long to love

A night

A day”