No 7: IT’S BEEN MONTHS

PHOTO BY FAYE RAAD

REBECCA KOPELMAN

It’s been months, but it’s hard to stop myself from thumbing obsessively through your instagram at least every few weeks. 

It’s been months, but sometimes I try to picture myself in your room again, kissing you again, holding your clumsy hand in mine. 

You are impenetrable from this distance, from this angle.

It’s been months, and I can’t picture your face as it is in reality. As it breathes and sweats and cries. As it lives when not reduced to two dimensions behind a fingerprinted screen.

Sometimes, I can’t help but navigate to a photo of your bare, anonymous shoulder, sunburnt or tattooed or freckled or being clasped by the New Girlfriend. 

I’m prettier, I think, then shake my head as if to forcibly evict the profoundly unfeminist thought. What would Gloria Steinem think? I’m sure this girl is lovely.

It’s gotten harder to see myself fitting into your life, into your self. I wonder how our bodies even curved into each other in bed, how I fell asleep in the hollow beneath your collarbone. It couldn’t have been comfortable. Surely I was just telling myself you were soft, that you were genuinely good or caring or full of love. 

I notice that you’ve lost some weight. I hope you’re eating, but I also hope you’re rotting from the inside.

(I don’t mean that, I don’t think. I want you to hurt, but I know that you already have, maybe more than I ever did.)

Allow me my little inhumanities, my little absurdities and distant obsessions. 

Let me flip off your building every time I pass it, let me stiffen when I hear your name or your college or your major. 

(Yours is a common name, your college well known, your major mine, so allow me to tense through most of my day.)