You were reading the same book as me. I didn’t think it meant anything until it did. It’s strange how we can make a different version of people in our heads. I made one of you when we first met, based solely on that book. You are a kind, caring person. Someone who has a good taste in music, maybe draws a little, and probably plays guitar. Nothing fazes you, as you tend to be confident, and very rarely are you down in the dumps. We would make art together, as I am an artist, and we would read together, as I am a reader. A couple of days a week, we would meet at a coffee shop downtown to talk and laugh about whatever our days had held. You would be picture-perfect.
Once we finally got together, I knew you were never this version I had imagined. I wish I had known about your anger issues; the problems you have with every move I make. I wish I had known about the nights to come, fake laughter with friends, and then forceful, loud nights together in your apartment. I wish your friends had warned me, but I shouldn’t blame them, they had no clue. I wish you did like music, art, and the guitar, but all you like is hard liquor, hard drugs, and your couch. I wish I had known how to leave before things got bad, even worse for that matter, but I always kept that version of you, the one I had made of you, in the back of my head. I wish I had never given you the benefit of the doubt. I wish I had never seen that book. I wish I never bought that book. I wish we had never read the same book.
I threw away that book a year later. Now, finding myself again, I am on my way to Boston. Hundreds of miles away from you, it will never be far enough. As the train whistles past towns, cities, counties, I imagine you chasing the tail end, a Godzilla-like creature making
wreckage from town, to city, to county, just to find me. I tell myself this, yet you would never do that. You can’t do that. Because, as the sun sets on my way to a new beginning, you will be stuck in Washington, and I will forever be free.
