I hate this feeling.

You. I’m not sure why I’m writing this in second person, maybe I’m just hoping that somehow these words will reach you one day. This is wistful thinking, but I desperately hope that one day we’d be together in some place, laughing at my silly words in an imprudent prophecy such as this.

Leaving the fantasy asides, reality is not all that pretty. Because this is how I’ll lose you. This is how I’ll lose us. If only I haven’t already.

You were fascinated by me, wondering how I got to be so adventurous, passionate and pliable. I alluded to my past riddled with trysts. You’d listen to my adventures but you’d only hear as much as you want. You’d relegate the rest to a realm of hazy fantasy, divorcing it from me. You see a charming imp, unmarred by darkness, unfettered by pain. I saw your ignorance as acceptable, forgetting that we’re fire and we can’t tolerate comfortable, we can’t tolerate boring.

Our skype calls seem to cut shorter and shorter each time. The only strings between us now are words - words on the telephone line, words on a screen. Although honestly they cause more complications than clarity. On the phone there are always voices in the background. And on the screen there are always sentences saying you have to go. Without our interactions, our common stories, our baseline of coexistence, everything feels fragmented and strained.

Sometimes I want to look at the sky and know that you see what I see, and call out to you whether you still remember what it was like when we were able to hold hands. I want so badly to cover a thousand miles in a single step but end up crying at the permanent indifference of the map.

You’ll begin to shut me out and I’ll feel it in an instant. We’ll drift apart and I’ll ache in my bones as you retreat further and further away. Memories of us, once fresh, stinging and ripe, will slowly fade away until the gap is no longer purely physical, and is no longer a gap at all for that matter, having become - suddenly, seemingly overnight - a chasm. You’ll have your life in Lausanne and I’ll live mine elsewhere. We’ll sleep when the other is awake, eat different food and meet different people. We’ll grow apart. Our joined memories will become old and worn and fondly, if not a little sadly, remembered, like an old jacket kept in a box high in the attic above the house where new memories are actively being manufactured.

And although when it is ready to fade back into the vapour that these things are born into, I’m not sure I could watch it leave.