Wasteful

               There is something to be said about missing someone. Something about being half a world away, in a different time and place. It’s strange to see how easily we reconcile after a weekend spent in separate times and locations, how the coffee poured Monday morning tastes just as it did on Friday, how the sheets of our bed feel just as smooth and cool on our bare skin.

               Even stranger is the way we manage to come together years later, and how the words still feel easy on our lips, how our arms know just the way to form around each other as we embrace. But there is also something to be said for that time apart. Perhaps in missing someone, we realize how we can do without them, what we can do without them. We still turn out the lights each night and snuggle into our sheets; the starry night sky emerges, and then is covered by the brightness of the morning. The world spins. Time passes. We go on.

               Our minds stick constantly upon that one special person. Where they are, what they’re doing, how they’re feeling, if they’re thinking of us just as we are of them. It does no good to wonder, the time becomes even stickier and slower as it plods along. It does no good to question, if we aren’t truly concerned with the answers.

               But we have to stop thinking, stop missing. Somewhere between digits five and six of your phone number, I have to pause. Somewhere in between your street address and your city, I have to stop. And now my bedside table is littered and covered in postcards and scraps of paper and all the little things that I’ve been wishing to tell you. The same bedside table littered with the sunsets I’ve seen alone, the stained coffee rings of a single mug on a napkin, the missing you. It is stained and covered with missing you.

               I wasted so much worrying for you, worrying about you. Worries laced with selfishness and greed, as I only worried about your well-being for my own. And now that I’ve returned, I see I shouldn’t have bothered with the worrying and with the missing. Because you weren’t missing back, half a world away. You didn’t give me a second thought. Now all that’s left is a postcard, taped to my bedroom wall, of the wonderful place I missed out on, because I was distracted by the name and address I began to scrawl onto the other side. All that’s left is a half-addressed postcard that will never be sent.