(a.k.a. in which I listen to the Hamilton soundtrack on repeat as part of the attempt to get over you)
Say,
That would be enough.
Say you’d still want this:
us alive, right here, feeling lucky.— Ada Limón
Headphones on, bus rumbling through rivers. Rain falling. “Should we climb mountains and cross rivers together?” I asked. “Of COURSE we should,” you responded.
So we did our best in the weather that was given to us. You promised me an adventure, and we sang so many songs along the way. We have arrived at the end of the trail, bursting from all the tough terrain and beauty that is now behind us. I come away from it, quietly delighting in the way we got so close to it all and yet managed to remain so far. “Just call it horizon, & you’ll never reach it.” I hold the topography of your landscape close inside me as I watch it grow smaller in the rearview mirror. “Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,” you send to me some final lines of poetry. I resolve to comply.
“Beep beep boop,” chirped my phone as it revived itself in the world of reception. “Beep beep boop,” I responded, trying to speak a language you’d understand.
***
After I walked to the edge of the world and back, the big all-terrain wheels of the bus shook me from side to side. The movement made everyone else nauseous — yet all I wanted to do was write about my feelings. “That’s probably a metaphor for your life,” my friend tells me solemnly after I recount my actions. “You should blog it.”
And it’s #Hamilversary today! So just for fun, in lieu of emo poetry, here’s our love story in too many parts, composed on a bus-and-plane ride, told only in lyrics excerpted and rearranged from a musical.