I’m sitting here, thinking about you. Wondering if you’re awake like me, toiling around the wide web that captured the world. Oscillating between the R&B of my youth playing softly through tangled headphones and a Twitter feed full of insomniacs just like me. I don’t sleep. I’m a disciple of Nas, following his commandment to envision nocturnal slumber as the cousin of death. What isn’t dead is my love for you, my thoughts of what you are doing in the deep doldrums of night and whether or not I’m on your mind like you are taking up shop inside of mine.
Probably not, I know. My thoughts of you aren’t romantic, I know. Maybe or maybe not. Our relationship was brief, a friendship really. You came into my life during the time when the world stopped due to a virus that just kept on going. Instagram algorithms brought us together, two strangers living in a city where folk being strange to each other isn’t common. Smaller than a tick, that’s the place we call home. I feel like we’ve seen each other in the grocery store before or passed each other in the nearby park that connects us. Too busy fascinated by technology in our hands to look up to see the analog escapes in our side-view. I don’t know if you have stopped for me but I have certainly stopped for you.
I think we followed each other because we were two lost artistic souls looking to be found in someone who didn’t move in the ways of the world that surrounds us. You’re Midwest mighty, I reek of East Coast chutzpah. We traded enough pleasantries to schedule a play-date between us. Four hours of getting away from my-version-of-here and your-reality-of-there. I fell in love with the image of what we could be, the redemption to be held for past relationships that couldn’t stay friendly because the lust got in the way.
But then I would dream of you and ache. You fucked me up. Hardbody. See your face and curse the Good Man for initiating your creation. You would say things to me that I couldn’t comprehend in any other way but all types of good. Said your heart was growing for me. Stay on the phone for hours with me. Read Scripture to me. Ecclesiastes. It’s the book of wisdom. All wisdom told me to walk the hell away, to spare myself the pain of this not working out because then and now isn’t the time for a relationship. Or a pain reliever. Or a good time. Or a long time. Or any version of us. Anything.
Then it became nothing. I don’t know why. My heart is afraid that I scared you. My head knows that you didn’t want to play ‘apartment’ with someone when you’re in the mood to build a house. I wouldn’t let you move in, so you vacated the premises of our relationship. The Holy Spirit knows it was the right thing to do. I didn’t need to fight demons while in something so heavenly. I would never be at peace. So you did me a favor.
Or not.
ciara roslyn-james 