On unwanted healing.

Once there was a part of me that fell in love with concepts, with potentials, with the insides of minds I only barely got to see. I made mix tapes in the dark and wrote letters I never sent. Once, I knitted my dreams into a scarf. It’s half-finished, gathering dust, and I don't know where. If I ever finish it, I might wear it myself, just to prove a point. But that part has gone away, to parts unknown, and it didn’t leave a note.

I lost the part of me that wrote poetry in my sleep, the one that devoted every spare moment to dreaming. It wore away somewhere in between the dashboard of his car and the cold air of his garage. If I looked, I think I would find pieces of it tangled in their Christmas lights, in the way I looked in their mirror. Traces would be found on wooden floors in the middle of the woods. It’s tangled in his hair somewhere, caught in the chain of her necklace, on the fabric of his grandmother’s quilt. It drifts up in the smoke of his pipe in the small apartment bathroom, in the clouds of mint smoke from a long-shattered hookah.

I am trying to find it. I’m digging for it in the footprints I leave outside of his cabin. I search for it in the whorls of his ceiling, and find only faces that look like the ones that flow in ink and color from my brother’s hands. This is you. I thought maybe I’d find it in the Boykin spaniel’s golden eyes, in the griffins on the backs of his calves. There are times I think I’ve come close: his head pressed on my chest to hear my heartbeat as he touches me, our voices vibrating through the springs of his mattress in the dark, the way his pulse is the strongest I have ever heard, and I don’t even have to be touching him to feel it.

But I’m starting to think the piece will always be missing now. There are times I reach inside myself to find it and feel something that’s like new skin over old wounds. I feel like I lost a key to a lock I hadn’t yet found, and when I reach it, I will be barred, stuck forever on the wrong side of a gate I never knew I needed to open. I wonder if I gave myself away too early, if I was supposed to ration the love songs and heatbreak so I had some left to give when I finally learned how.

I look for songs to break myself open later, ones that will remind me of fire-heated rooms and long nights full of cigarettes and too much Diet Coke. I look for the lyrics that will remind me of the smell of bourbon and thunderstorm cologne and the cold air of mid-winter. I can’t find it. Not a single song clicks home.

I cast my net out for the memory that will belong to him, months from now. The one I will remember when I think of him, the way I remember music on a ratty couch and a hand on my shoulder as a fire blazes. Every time, I come up empty, and I am afraid. I’m afraid to forget, but more than that, I’m afraid I’ve numbed myself to the urge to remember, to cling to details like lifelines, proof like carvings in my heart to remind myself, This was real.

I wonder what it means to know that I would rather have that broken place, full of all its shattered memories, than to lose it and all the things it held