Burning

There was something about her, he can't remember, though he's so sure it's the same damn thing that made him, his heart, to surrender.

There was a time where they shared the same exact thoughts, shared the same exact feelings, of love reciprocating.

They were married, in his head.

They were happy, they had children, they even had a puppy, just the way they wanted it to be.

He recalled how they met, how she looked stunningly beautiful at first glance, and then the second, sublime. He could swear he'd die at the third.

He's just there, sitting. On a bench, a random, not that relevant, bench. But it's special, it's where he first saw her.

It's somewhere he goes when he needs to remember her face. Where in reality, he never really forgot, everything. The first time they met, how they were inseparable, how things went horrible, how everything they had worked for crumbled.

Now he can only reminisce, he can only think of her, of them together.

What they had once.

They don't have now.

And all of it, can only be replayed, in his head.

The cruelest thing about grief is how it keeps the door open. How it lets you walk back in, every single time, just to remind you that the house is empty now.

He wonders if she ever sits somewhere the way he does. If there's a bench, a corner, a quiet patch of the world that holds her the way this one holds him, gently, uselessly, something you cradle that's already broken.

He doubts it.

That was always the difference between them.

He kept everything. She traveled light.

The leaves have changed since the last time she sat beside him here. Seasons moved on the way she did, without asking, without apology, without once looking back to see what they were leaving behind. He stayed. He always stayed. That was his fatal flaw, he thought. That loving her felt less like a choice and more like a condition. Like breathing. Like the way the chest just keeps going even when you've given it every reason to stop.

He closes his eyes and she's there immediately.

She always is.

Laughing at something he said that wasn't even that funny. Head tilted, nose scrunched, the sound of it catching him off guard the way it always did, like hearing a song for the first time and knowing instantly you'll never get it out of your head.

He would give anything to hear it one more time.

Even the silence after.

Even the part where she stops and looks at him like he's something ordinary. Like he's furniture she's grown used to. Like he's always just there.

He was always just there.

And now he's here. Still. Alone on the same bench where it all began, replaying a story she's long since forgotten, in a theater built for one, for the one man who can't, who doesn't want to be moved.

How her lips taste, how it's easy to love her that's as easy breathing, how her mole looked at the side of her lips, the shape of her face when she smiled, when she cried.

The last thing they ever talked about, he can't remember.

But God, he remembers everything else.

Karina, Oh Karina, it burns.

How, just how can I? Do you think I have forgotten about you?

How will I ever have the ability to look for someone that's not you, if you had made me feel every little thing that's as irreplaceable as you?

Where were you when I needed you most?

It rang, and rang, and rang in his ears.

A question with no one left to answer it.

That was the thing about loving Karina, she filled every room she walked into, and when she left, she took the walls with her. He wasn't left with emptiness. He was left with ruin. And there is a difference. Emptiness is bearable. Emptiness is just space. Ruin is what remains when something was there, when something mattered, when you had already started calling it home.

He had called her home.

Stupid, he thinks. Stupid, stupid, stupid. To have loved someone so completely that your chest now feels like a city after a storm, still standing, barely, but nothing where it used to be.

He tries, sometimes. To look at other people the way he looked at her. To let someone else's laughter be enough. To sit across from a warm face and think, Maybe. Maybe this time.

But then she surfaces. She was always there.

like someone tucks their hair behind their ear. In the quiet between songs. In the smell of coffee at 2am, which was always theirs, late nights, whispered conversations, her saying tell me something nobody else knows about you like she was collecting pieces of him, like she actually intended to stay.

And he had told her everything.