trust in the winter

Dear K-

Don’t retrace steps through broken glass and rusty shards of metal. Spring betrays us with thoughts of sentimentality, bringing us to doubt decisions of the past and longing for what we have left behind. Of course you miss her. The weather gets warmer and we see the sunrise and we think of sleeping outside and whispering language into a sweet girl’s ear while laying atop lumpy blankets over prickly grass under star-filled skies.

But never trust the moon when you’re about to fall in love. You cannot take back the sighs and murmurs of lost summers, and regrettable as it may be some loves are lost for good. I will never again caress the flesh of the tender Slovenian who stole my heart and kept it abroad as a keepsake. Do I miss him? Do I miss?

It’s only human.

But what can we do? Is it possible to believe that lost loves go about their daily lives without any thought of us at all? It must be so, otherwise we would hear from them and know that their hearts still beat. But we don’t. At least, I don’t. I assume they have forgotten about me, carrying out their daily tasks without a single pang of memory of me and what we had together. And rightly so. It only serves to further frustrate me, however, when I find myself drifting into nostalgia whenever I make French toast, or ride my bike aimlessly down city streets and feel the wind whipping through my hair, or drink my tea with milk. Will I ever give up the ghost of lovers lost?

Don’t let spring tint your vision rosy in retrospect. Love is lost for a reason. Sometimes we should not go looking for it in the same old places where we found it before. There is nothing left for us in those places-they’ve been found by someone else now.

-K