It’s never been easy for me to write about matters that come from the heart. It makes my spine tingle and my soul shake when I think about them. When I try to write them down, I hope in vain that somehow it will help, but my pen moves in slow motion, dragging out the words, the thoughts that race through my mind. Tears drop and smear the ink, and my heart dances across the page. I’m writing about who I’ve lost, and why he’ll never come back to me.


I’ve realized that sometimes you can’t have what you’ve lost. What you try to hold close flys away like a bird trapped in your hands. Sometimes that bird might come back, if it remembers the way. You might come across what you lost one day, a picture lost in a messy desk, a flower pressed in a book, or a memory you just dusted off to reveal what you forgot.


Somehow, you never forget about the people you’ve lost on your way. I know this because my heart’s told me I can’t forget him. That no matter who I see I wish it was him standing in front of me. That it was him who made me smile or the one I cried to last night. Instead of people telling me they know how I feel, that it was him telling the truth. Just wishing that he would look at me and think nothing but of the way he used to feel about me. That he would believe me, instead of telling me to stop lying to him. Sometimes, I wish I could come back to how it all began.


“A hut made of driftwood on some island?” he asked, “why in the world would you want to live there?”


I raised my head from the grass and told him, “Because there I would never have a worry, I could lay in the sand, and dream all day.”


“Only you would love something like that,” he said, mocking me.


“Would you be there with me?” I asked.


“Where?”


“On that island, on that beach, with me?”


“With that hut made of driftwood? Of course,” he said to me.


My heart had leapt over the tress that stretched behind us, jumped over the dark clouds that drifted across the night sky, and touched the starts that we tried to count infinitely that night. Finally, his hand touched mine and I was pulled back to Earth, back to him.


I had never dreamed someone could find me like he did. Not just lost in the crowd, but the part of myself that lied deeper than anyone was willing to go. He tore down walls I had carefully constructed with only a few words, and opened my heart to spill all of its secrets. No corner of my mind was unknown to him, and I knew that I loved him.


We sang is his car all the songs that we knew, we laughed when the time was never right. I taught him to love the small things, like lying under the stars and pinky promises. He showed me what mattered the most, and taught me everything I know about football. We played in the storms just to get wet, we explored our dreams and he said to me, “Keep your dreams close to your heart, where no one can take them away.”


I’ve lost him. I’ve lost the boy who made my heart fall to my knees, the one who made me smile, the one who shook my world. My heart had simply stopped caring. In my dreams he never smiled, and eventually I could never see him looking back at me. He cared for me, more than I’ll ever imagine, but for a reason I’ll never understand, I couldn’t care anymore. I knew I could not take all of his love, but give him nothing back. My heart tore, it ripped open, it crashed to the floor, and came to a halting stop. I could never hurt him, I couldn’t. But I knew, the hurt I made now, would be nothing if I kept on and never loved him the same.


So I told him. That morning in February. It was so cold. My cheeks stung as the tears streaked down my face. He looked up at me. His eyes betrayed him, and I saw the hurt. I had smashed the world from under his feet, and left his heart to bleed, I had hurt him. I couldn’t stand to look at him, to feel the aftershock of my words. I was shaking, I couldn’t breathe, and my thoughts were gone. It was so cold.


He’ll never come back. He brought a happiness into my heart I’m scared sometimes I won’t feel again. Sometimes I have dreams, about him. My favorite, is the one where he stands on the beach, next to our driftwood hut, and turns to smile back at me.