Dim

I want to tell you how I felt when I met him and I also want to tell you how I felt when I left him.

When I met him he moved me. Quite literally, the sight of him standing in front of me moved me on from love that had lost its light into a state of finding the light switch. It was dark at the time but if I kept feeling up and down the cold uneven walls and eventually I would find the switch.

He helped me put my hand on the switch but I don’t know if we ever really turned it on. The motion was never straight up but side to side, uneven. Too far in one direction too short in another. 

The light there was dim. Together we operated on a dimming knob like the ones I used to see at my friend's houses in the suburbs when I was in high school. Darkness, then brightness, then more brightness, and darkness. 

It never got light enough to feel the notes he wrote me. 

I could read them in the dimly lit space between us but I did not feel them on my hands and in my mouth. What is the point of words if you can’t feel them but a reminder of emptiness and all of the things they could hold?

I tried to turn the switch in the direction of brightness in hopes to fill the I love you’s and I miss you’s with something I could feel like the sand people mix into containers at Christian weddings. But his sand was blue and mine was yellow and when they mixed together they turned green. 

I have never liked green.

I think he felt the emptiness when he dreamed. At 2 am he reached unconsciously across the bed to find me and his hand met skin. He had found my body but I was not inside of it.

 I learned that you can feel emptiness, that the absence of something is just as obvious as feelings of fullness. You just have to know when it's not there.