I took the wrong bus and ended up at your place today, dear.
The trees still look the same, even though it’s been a while since I last saw them. There is still graffiti on the walls and it still smells musty, like old lifts. But the diggers and aluminium walls weren’t here before, so I suppose some things have changed.
It’s not hard to just take another bus and get back on track, and I was already late after all, but it grew more enticing, more sensible, and perhaps a little more fun to wander around the block of HDB flats and pet a stray cat, hope that no cat-hater ever finds it. But the cat doesn’t really care, it just purrs as I scratch behind the ears. I left it sitting on the bench, and I watched as the cat yawned and went back to sleep.
You never liked to leave your house, but I’ve only noticed this in retrospection, from hours of Instagram-chasing. I’ve always been like this, too late, only remembering things in retrospection, realising things and noticing it, miles after something has passed me by. The person you knew before now wasn’t shielded by rose tinted lenses, just blind to things that weren’t reflective.
Do you remember that there was a frangipani in front of my block? The white flowers were always in a pile beneath it, like it never stopped growing and shedding, all at once. I never told you how when I was little, I used to watch my friends climb it, while being too afraid to ascend. But I wasn’t afraid of the narrow ledges, you held my hand as I tight-roped across.
It has never occurred to me, how much of me you never knew. It has never been like me to notice the lack of information we had of each other, and perhaps that was where we went wrong. I think it was where I went wrong- Not that all of it was my fault alone. But it seems to me that I never asked questions that were important, how the surface of our concrete ground seemed enough for the two of us.
Occurring to me now, is truth that remains buried deep under. Occurring to me now, only after everything is over, is the part where I went wrong.
Everything, in the end, became all about me, didn’t it? You know the answer- No one else will know the truth we hold within our bodies. Tell me if you know it, please, if I’ve finally gotten it right.
There are more important things, clearly. I know that now, and it’s far too late to tell you about everything I know. The fact that I know will never be enough. The fact that I’m different will never be enough. The fact that I’m sorry will never be enough.
It’s not that I want you back. I don’t, you never liked telling me that you didn’t want to go out and you left me feeling used. You gave me dog tags with our names engraved on it and I lost them, deep in my body where it became tidal waves of anger and sadness and regret, and I know it’s because of you.
But it’s not about me, or what I know, or who I am. It’s about you, what I turned you into, in poems and stories, it’s about who you were that I never took the time to know. I knew you then, but who you were was lost to my obsession with little things. You, who never let go of me, the tightrope walker.
A branch from the frangipani tree in front of my house broke a while ago. Some kid tried too hard to climb. Nothing will make that tree the same again. But it keeps growing.
I boarded the correct bus this time. I won’t look back again, so listen carefully, before the wind steals these words that will never be enough:
I am sorry.
And just like that, you were gone.
november crowbar 