It is always from the simplest thing that stirs a sense of haunting and wanting, inciting the heart to yearn for the things we have lost in time. when our eyes catch a glimpse of something that jolts a hidden memory we were adamant to stash away. it is then the pandora box of our emotions open up and sent us spiralling to a state of poignancy. a momentary lapse of sensability and stoicism.
I never knew them. I never knew them until they began to linger like afflicted souls languishing for a chance at redemption. I never knew them until they resurrected in the form of strangers and passerbys. They were tiny instances and pieces of him: the guy in the jumper, the man with a brisk walk strolling by, the gentleman reading in the park. Suddenly, I found myself constantly reminded of him and I realized how I never knew the three poignant images he unwittingly ingrained into the deep recesses of my mind.
I caught myself lately in the habit of twirling my hair into tiny curls in those moments - only in those moments of anxiety, when I have no control of my personage. Those moments when we would both be quick to laugh about anything and everything, as filler for the dead air that would invariably beset the blank space between each line of dialogue that we drafted in the pages of our minds. Those moments where we still felt playfully tense. I would twirl my hair as I traced the features of his face with my eyes, looking for answers and reactions that were still unfamiliar. I was that girl named Maria in that Adam Duritz song that played on the radio when we were still feeling out the lines between wrong and right.
he was no longer here. Yet, he still remained all around me, embodied in every man I saw. A chuckle here, a smile there. These memories were indeed nuances, unmistakeable and irreplaceable, made noticeable only in his absence. Despite verisimilitude, they were mere spectres of his person, neither complete nor the same, except in his presence. And I missed him.
