even if I told it linearly, there’s still no straight explanation.

I want to say I’ll remember you this way,

the way you are on a Monday morning, when your hair was short and your curls sprung from your head in rays of gold, and summer was

forever.

I want to say I’ll think of you like I did

on a Thursday evening, tucking fake diamonds like secrets into your palms, hiding your smile beneath lipstick as dark as the paint beneath my fingernails,

a spring awakening.

After, I remember the awkwardness,

the discomfort of you, the way you looked when you flirted, the way

your shoulders snapped to your ears like a deer in the headlights, as I sat with a boy I’d never met and will never meet again,

alone in a sea of machines

Abandoned, affection curdles in my chest,

the way wood glue curdles on the tips of your fingers, curling into itself like

your dirty socks in the back of my car, as you pressed your lips to mine, and I pulled

away.

I’m not confused, except for in all the ways that I am.

You had him, his golden hair and sunshine smiles, his careless laughter and confident uncertainty, scattering jokes like abandoned seedlings in the wilderness of the world, and he

had you, your knife-sharp eyeliner and bullet-shaped sarcasm, reckless and self-assured in your own destruction, hurling like a meteor into danger like you always knew you’d make it out alive, and I

had you, on rooftops and stairwells and under basement lights, breathing smoke into my mouth with every dark ring you left on my lips, until

you had him. And then

you had me.

Which of us was it, that wasn’t enough?