Sometimes I still want you.

 

I can’t even fully remember what you look like. Your hair is there, your height. Everything else is obscured. Like you’re sitting behind a frosted window separated from me by the barrier I tried to put up between us. 

 

You crept in like the first hints of nausea. The inkling of a feeling, deep in my stomach and at the back of my throat. 

  

I resisted at first, not wanting your voice or your eyes to mean something to me, to permeate the part of my brain that warned me about you, turning off whatever mechanism produces reason.

 

After a while, I let you linger, letting you seep into me during class and then stay there for the walk back home.  

 

I looked at the trees as the cool weather began to ravish them. I looked at the cars passing through campus. I looked at my feet as they hit the ground or my arms as they swung with my strides, and I thought of you.

 

I changed my outfits, ripping through my closet, cursing the shirt I once loved or the sweater my mother had gifted me. 

 

I looked for anything. Numbers that made patterns or songs that would come on when I hit shuffle. I looked for colors of birds and hidden symbols in puddles after it rained. I voiced prayers in the shower, urging whatever was above to send you to me.

 

—

 

That’s when it started again. 

 

I let the possibility of you taunt me at the foot of my bed each night. I let it trickle into my bloodstream, mingling with what kept me alive. I let it sit on my shoulder when I went to class, whispering of your face or hands. 

 

Worst of all I let it live in my mirror. It blended with the glass, obscuring itself behind the reflective covering until I stood, looking at my legs or my arms. It hissed and spit cruelties, ripping apart my nose or the skin underneath my eyes. 

 

At one point it left the mirror, vacating it for a new, more advantageous home. It crawled into the bathroom and sat on the toilet seat. It didn’t speak this time but instead urged me with its countenance. 

 

I gasped for breath on the floor, wrung my hands till they cracked, and stared at the toilet until my eyes could take no more.

 

It got worse before it got better. The urges it brought on never left. They performed their siren’s wails each time I saw myself in the mirror or passed by the bathroom. 

 

Their cries were distant at first; echoes of what they had once been. Though they grew, gaining might the longer their throats produced sound. They screamed in the end, abandoning any sense of melody. My ears bled and my head shook but they only continued, their pitch becoming shriller and more desperate.

 

I saw the marks on my hand before I had realized what I had done. They were red like before. I felt the high next, it veiled the part of you I had within me. I stumbled to my bed before the dizziness hit. 

 

I realized then that I wasn’t thinking of you. 

 

The ecstasy of the act was more than enough to silence you. It permeated my mind like humidity, clinging to surfaces even with the windows closed. It attached itself to my senses, producing a film over top of them, forcing them to slow. It wrapped its spectral arms around my neck and squeezed. 

 

Worst of all I let it.

 

No longer did I feel your hands on my face or the small of my back. For a few fleeting moments, it was like you had snuck out through my door while I was asleep, lingering at the doorway before leaving, watching me as I lay unaware.

 

—

 

You’re still here. You come and go like the other thoughts. 

 

Sometimes I can feel you behind me as I get dressed or when I put my hair up in a way you wouldn’t have liked. Sometimes I can hear you, your voice mingled with the urges and their muted shrieks.

 

You have stayed in my bedroom doorway, lingering with determination. You watch me, your eyes unblinking. But now I know you’re there.

 

I know you’re no better than what took years off my heart and stripped my body of sustenance and any hope of stamina. I know that the feel of my collarbones and the feel of your gaze on me they’re the same.

 

Finally, I understand.