To my ex,

It’s so odd to think that one day you knew me inside and out. And I, you. Once, we yearned to be so close together, we attached. I felt your warm breath on my neck, your hands on my skin, inside, outside.

Today, you are just another person in the supermarket, shopping for contents to a life that I don’t have any knowledge or part of. If I touched you now, you would recoil, you’d ask what I was doing, you’d look at me like a stranger who carelessly bumped into you.

Then, I could ask you and tell you things without words. We had our own language. A language that existed in a finite stitch of time and in the next stitch it was gone.

Now, you seem like someone else, someone new, different, not the other half of “us.” The only other person who knew that language was real, not just something I imagined.

The way you look at me, I know you see someone new, too. But we are wrong. We are still us, just new versions. We are adapting and reacting and changing over and over every moment. There is a new version of me and one of you in each second that we breathe.

You are forever a part of this version of me that always cooks an egg on a high flame, who tells their partner exactly what they want even when it’s scary, because I know that it’s so worth it. Because of you there was once a yellow light that is now red, and a welcomed surprise that is now a necessity.

You are the yes, in “Yes, I’ve been there. Yes, I’ve heard that. Yes, I know how strong I am. Yes, I’ll be okay. Yes, I know that I fart in my sleep (why do people keep insisting on telling me this?).”

I watch you leave, on your way to your life, knowing that we will always be more and less than strangers. We are forever connected and disconnected. We have learned whatever it is we needed to teach each other. Our time was necessary and it is over.

I am grateful to you as I am grateful for scars. They are a part of me and they are my compass. Without them I would not know which direction to go. I’d be lost. You are part of my past and my present and my future. You are part of my limbs, moving forward, walking away.

~ Your limbs, walking away

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Editor: Emily Bartran

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