Slipping

Cut to leaving. I am a firefly in the dark room of your house, a hopeful piece of light for you and we stay hopeful that my imprint on you lasts longer than the urge to buzz myself into the porch light. We hope I don’t fall through the cement cracks, my burnt body disappearing into a hiding place you can’t ever squint your eyes enough to find. We are for each other as much as we’ll ever be; we’re holding on to every moment like it’s the last drop of IV fluid.

Cut to this scene of me here, counting the days on a calendar that shows me eternity. I’m in the waiting room at a hospital, only knowing that my turning pages in the most recent issue of Cosmo does not make time go any faster; your diagnosis is potentially that you need me there by your side. We told ourselves that distance met no match and doctors prescribed the numbing of our desperation. We are experts in adapting to each other’s decreased daily dosage of our own medicine, we’re meticulously controlling the delay of serotonin we get from each other; this delay is a side effect from being unable to hear our whispers of sweet somethings at night.

Cut to slipping. I had the urge to get the hell out of dodge, so I packed up my Camry. Kissed you like it’s our last day forever and flew to somewhere. Slipping is like “Hey, honey how are you doing?” and waiting for a response until 4 hours later. It’s like, “We’re going to talk tonight, right?” It’s like, “When’s the only day we can bask in each other’s presence, not worry about the kitchen clock ticking as we lie in the soaked wet grass, where we throw our clothes and our feelings toward the sky?”

Cut to wanting. Let us stop adapting to this routine of accepting the other person won’t be there when we walk in the door after a long day. Let us stop slipping, but take an oath in between our bailing on FaceTime that after all this is done, we won’t live anywhere but in each other’s living rooms. Let’s plan to never let this world callous us from feeling what it’s like to miss, to be missed, and to go to sleep planning out exactly what we’ll do to each other the moment we see each other’s tired faces again. Let us throw the pills that suppress us down the toilet, keep each other’s lights bright, and go back to being inevitably and completely foolish children in love.