Anca Dunavete

There are nights when I still burn with passion for everything we did and everything we could have done. On those nights, I don’t sleep at all. I toss and turn for hours, feverish, longing, alive. Other nights, I sleep soundly and wake up laughing at all the ones I don’t.

‘What am I losing sleep over?‘ ‘I ask myself each morning. ‘There’s blood singing in your veins. You can do so much more. You can be anything you want. Let go of the stories you stitched together; they belong to neither of you now.‘

But it takes little more than a few hours in this mundane backdrop with a splash of surreal I call my life to want to return to fantasy. The real world can never compete with my imagination, which is exactly why it terrifies me. And why I love it so fiercely.

Each memory pounds on the door, taps at the windows, slips through the cracks in the wall, begging to be played first. Every one of them holds his face, his voice, his hands. There are so many. He happened for long days and hot nights, and it all felt like a little life. His fingerprints are still on my steering wheel. That’s fine with me; I don’t know where to, yet.

I let go of myself and the world around me to lose myself in the sweet, secret, delicious, ambiguous feelings he stirred and stirred and stirred, and that I now can’t stop stirring on my own. These memories bring a familiar calm, and suddenly I’m safe from the emptiness again.

I know I have to let my sadness spill – through ink, through tears – if I ever want to leave this loop. Let me just see him one more time before I write it all out. Play.