goodbye, farewell, until we meet again

I started writing about me but I don't want to write about me anymore. I want to write about you. I want to write about you before you disappear and become a lyric on the tip of my tongue. I want to write about you before the story ends and gets turned into a movie that never made me feel the same way as the book did. I've spent 5 months underlining my favorite parts about you and folding the corners of your pages and spilling coffee all over you. I look around the room now and i want to take a picture of your misleading cover and broken spine. Sometimes I wish you were small enough to carry around in my pocket so I could pull you out when I'm riding Trax. You'd make a great waiting room companion if only as an excuse to avoid making eye contact with all the sick people in the world.

Because the world is full of sick people. And the worst part about it is that they don't know they're sick and neither do the doctors. Their guts are all broken and their insides are dead. They thought creative writing was just a class and never listened to any of the songs. They never wondered about bricks and paper clips or whether love really exists. And they probably never will.

I was working on a PowerPoint that would explain all of this for you, but we ran out of time. Your visa expired and college was on the other line. I told her not to break you or lose you but you never belonged to me in the first place. My adopted baby who, when people see us at the mall together they talk about how cute you are and how your tiny fingers look just like mine and how that one face you make is me to a tee, and you have my eyes. They say that you have my eyes. And I never have the heart to correct them. I've taken full credit for your dark hair and fair skin and I just wanted to let you know that I'm not sorry.

Because when you walk across the aisle to grab your diploma and enter the real world...just before you shake the superintendent's hand, I'm going to stand up and tell everyone that I'm the one who gives this woman away and I don't give a damn if your parents don't understand what's happening. Because I never believed in nature to begin with. You were a blank slate all along and when you wrote a tiny heart in the corner, I was the one who gave you the crayon.