If You Wanted It

If you wanted it, you could run away with my life. You could put it in your backpack, side by side with your bottled water, and go for one of your long walks. Actually, you could say you were going for a walk and go for a long trip instead, travel to a different city, disappear in a different culture, lose your voice in a different language. You could devise a careful plan, lay out your thoughts and strategy on ruled notebooks kept in drawers you have never seen me open. At night, while I sleep, you could look at my life and stare at its flame for hours, anticipating the day when you will run away with it. Please try not to feel nervous as such date approaches, because it would be silly to let your emotions jeopardize such a well thought operation. Instead, tell me how stressful your work has been in the last weeks; fill me in with insignificant details and fictitious rumors. Hasn’t the extent of my gullibility always amazed you? I won’t let you down. At some point, though, it will hit you, because you can’t erase thirteen years as you erase a day. Time has woven an invisible cobweb out of the most trivial pieces of life, those ones we struggle to remember. As you attempt to break loose, you feel all these little strings grappling to your skin and it’s more painful than you had foreseen; however, you already made up your decision and set up a date. Nothing will stop you, and you will pull stronger and in the last minute –you won’t admit this, it will become so unbearable that it’ll make you cry. When that happens, throw another lie at me, shake me, confuse me, lure me with sex. As soon as I fall asleep you can take my life and shovel it in your backpack. Yes, I’ll wake you up with coffee in the morning, but you must not allude in any way or form to the coldness of my touch, nor mention my unstable gait. Just wave goodbye as I wave goodbye and yell “see you later” from far away. Go chase your dreams as I fake ignorance and wave back at you and try to forget how I found your ruled notebooks a long time ago and read them all, how I used to wait eagerly for the next installment and the next lie. You should be a writer, I think as I rely on the windowsill and my body slowly forgets its ways to breathe.