If you could say one more thing, what would it be?
Nothing comes to mind
I sit across from you, my lips move, my mind whirls, but yet I have no last words. There are a million things that I could say to you, but nothing comes out. I’ve memorized the contours of your face, the way that your smile lines crease when your face lights up. I can read your facial expressions now, I know you too well. You might be a boyfriend or girlfriend, significant other, a best friend, a family member. Whoever you are, you mean the world to me and I wish you truly knew that. I wish that every thought that went through my mind I could say to you. I wish you could look into my eyes and just understand what I am trying to tell you.
Conversations with people we used to know
It’s funny how the people you know the best can be the most like a stranger. It’s odd how you can go from knowing someone so well in one moment and then not at all in the next. You can walk by, day after day and all you both will ever see is a stranger. We might both remember the last time we spoke, the words that cut so deep. Or maybe not, you might remember every good memory we had together. You might remember an especially good day, the moments that make a person worthwhile. Or alas, neither of these at all.
You might be absolutely indifferent to me, and I to you. For me, it doesn’t seem right to approach you, to ask you to rehash hurt feelings. It doesn’t seem right to ask that of anyone, after all we are just strangers. It’s not like we were something else to each other.
For you dear reader, I’m sure this makes you think of a specific individual. Because everyone always has a person. A person that you wish you could tell you miss, but you can’t. You can’t because you’re not allowed that small misstep. You aren’t allowed that leeway to breathe from feeling claustrophobic or constricted with the knowledge that for the rest of your life you will forever miss them a little bit.
If I asked you right now your last words, I doubt you could tell me them. I certainly couldn’t. I wish I could. I wish there was some way for me to seamlessly project my brain into images. To make sense of why everything happened in the way it did. I’ve pored over how everything happened, how I could have done it differently, what mistakes I made, how I wronged you. Of course I will always be my own worst critic, dissecting and looking through every little part of my life. I don’t have last words, because why would you tell a stranger your last words? It’s not like you had first words, or middle words, or anything at all to say to each other.
Last Words
I hate goodbyes more than anything else. I hate hanging up the phone. Having an awkward pause before the door slammed shut. I hate a goodbye hug. A goodbye smile, a goodbye wave. I hate it all, but I didn’t always hate it. There was a point in time when a goodbye didn’t mean so much to me. When it didn’t mean the loss of life, or the blink of my only access to the outside world, when it didn’t mean never speaking to a person again, when it didn’t mean leaving a place forever.
I feel like I was naive to not know that last words are inevitable and therefore so are goodbyes. Just because I hate them now, doesn’t mean I will forever. If you didn’t have last words then how would any word you ever spoke mean anything at all? If there is no inevitable goodbye then why does every hello before that matter?
I think the reason it matters to me so much is because I love to be alive. I love to be alive so much that I’m terrified of being dead. Of not existing to say goodbye, of not being able to give you my last words, of not being able to make an impact. I hope this isn’t too existential, but sadly it’s the reality we live in. It may be a reality you sometimes question, but it is all we have.
And so here are my last words: I love you life, I love you world, I love and I love and I love because at the end of the day if I didn’t love it all so deeply then what was the point in living?
