FREED VERSE

The last story you tell should be the one of your life, but what is a life that is bound by a story: to be a story is to have a beginning, middle, and end, and my life does not conform to this; no one’s does, since we are all more than the lives we live-- I'm also in the mind of my mother and my calculus classmate I always cheated off of and the guy I passed on the street last week: they all have some part of me left with them, making it so that my ‘life,’ my ‘story,’ is not mine to tell– it is partially mine, yes, but to claim that it is a story that could ever be fully told is disrespectful, yes, disrespectful, not only to my memory that is still alive and well but also to the people that cherish my memory and use it every day to create new lives, to build new storylines– whenever those were, are, will be, I will be there between their synapses and in their smiles and in the rage bubbling up inside of them at the mere thought of me– these are all my part of my story, so I cannot possibly tell it; I can, however, tell you pieces of snippets from my time here: I could tell you about the nights I spent sitting in long-empty streets looking at the negative space between clouds, laying in the middle of that road getting asphalt stains on the back of my work uniform while I was next to the coworker my best friend had a crush on, trying to convince myself I didn't want him, too, and that he didn’t know that both of us would kill to be laying there with him, to give him a ride home because his car ran out of gas or to pick him up something from Trader Joe’s on our lunch break; but of course he knew, and I can’t say I blame him for humoring us, for letting her let him walk her to her car every Friday night and letting me slip a gold dollar coin in his bag before he left for the night; I want to be angry at him, but I can’t say that I am because at least we had those movie-like moments that could never amount to anything for so many reasons, and now I’m here and I'm grown and I'm dating the man I’m going to marry, and I’m happy where I am and I'm happy I never had to fess up– now, the two of us are on separate coasts, finding separate loves, living separate lives with stories that will never be able to be told