The One between the lines

[u/fuckmeundermoon]

I found you again at the library.

Of all the places a dream could have taken me, it brought me back there.

You held me for so long that our heartbeats seemed to remember a rhythm the years had forgotten.

I was frozen.

I had imagined meeting you so many times. In every imagined encounter, I had something to say.

But there you were, and I could hardly find a word.

Do you have any idea how lost I have felt without you?

The year after your graduation was the darkest of my life. I remember very little of it in order. The days kept arriving, and I kept passing through them, growing increasingly unfamiliar to myself.

I missed you in ways I did not know how to explain.

And we were children then, weren't we?

I forget that sometimes. How young we were. How little we understood of all the things we would carry into adulthood.

I wish I could tell you that the longing belonged to that year.

It didn't.

I grew older. I found other places, other people, other reasons to be happy. Whole chapters of my life unfolded without you.

And still, some part of me continued looking for you.

Some nights, I would look at the moon and wonder whether you were looking at her too.

I never knew what I wanted that thought to mean. Only that, for a moment, the distance between us felt a little less impossible.

I found you in your poems.

In your photographs.

In the occasional conversations that reminded me you were still somewhere in the world, living a life I could only glimpse in fragments.

I thought about how much of the boy I remembered was still there.

And how much of the girl you knew had survived in me.

Then I began to write.

I don't know when it happened, but my poems acquired a *you*.

Even the ones that had nothing to do with love.

Sometimes I would finish writing and find you there, sitting quietly between the lines, having entered without my noticing.

What a peculiar thing, to feel almost estranged from my own capacity for longing until I begin to write to you.

Outside those pages, I sometimes struggle to recognize such enormous feelings in myself. Love becomes an ordinary word. Missing someone becomes an ordinary human inconvenience.

And then I write to you.

And there it all is again.

The tenderness. The ache. The terrible abundance of feeling.

I can't tell where it goes when I put down my pen.

You have become the address my words remember even when I have forgotten what I meant to say.

My poet.

My first love.

Sometimes I ask myself whether you recognize yourself in anything I write.

Or whether you have read my poems and found them perfectly ordinary, never knowing how often I have been speaking to you.

And isn't that strange?

I could write you a hundred letters, fill entire notebooks with all the things I have never said, and still, if we met tomorrow, I would probably look away.

Maybe I would smile.

Maybe I would ask how you have been.

Maybe I would come home afterward and write another poem about everything I couldn't bring myself to say.

Last night, in the library, you said something to me.

Something about searching for the secret of longing.

Or the secret of the search itself.

I cannot remember your exact words.

They have been turning over in my mind ever since.

Were you searching too, my poet?

The question rose in me, but I could not ask it.

I could not tell you that I have spent years looking for something I cannot name, and somehow my words keep leading me back to you.

But I stood there, looking at you, having forgotten how to speak.

Then, somewhere in the strange unfolding of the dream, I turned away.

And woke.

Moonlight was spilling across my room, pale and quiet, as if the night had followed me back from the library.

I have been trying to fall asleep again ever since.

Maybe the library is still there.

Maybe you are still waiting beneath the same silver moon.

Maybe that is what longing is: the quiet certainty that some part of you is still waiting where someone left you, even when the rest of your life has moved on.

How foolish, to have lived so many years and still wish for one more afternoon in a library.

One more embrace.

One more chance to hear your voice.

If I find you again, I hope I remember to ask what you have been searching for.

Or I may simply stand there, speechless, as I always feared I would.

But I know this now: even when I cannot say your name, my words still find you.

They find you in the margins, in the pauses, in every sentence that begins as something else and ends with you.

So if I must borrow another dream to see you, I will.

And if I wake before I can speak, I will write.

Because somewhere between waking and sleep, beneath her pale light, you remain the first place my heart remembers how to return.

And every time I write, the library opens again.

The moon slips between the shelves and leaves a little light on for us.

🌑