Something Worth Keeping

Maybe it’s funny but every time I try to write about you, the words die in my throat.  Is it that I know too much?  Or too little?  Or maybe I know nothing at all, and you’re just this person who I idealized because I wanted to put you under a category.  When in fact, you’re everything I imagined, except so much more.  

The gaps about you that I filled in, I have to undo them every time you surprise me. And then again when I realize you were joking, or lying.  What do I do?  When I convince myself that I don’t need you, and then I’m the one that pushes you away and it feels like the most wrong thing in the world. 

When you laugh and I think that maybe that sound is all I’ll ever need.  Until you can’t look me in the eye, and I feel everything all at once.  It’s not like I can tell you, not when I hardly know the answer myself.  You were the first person I ever wanted, and the first person I thought I didn’t want anymore.  

Now I’m so confused that I lie to myself.  All I need is to arrange my thoughts, and I can’t even count on them to be true.  I wish I could see what you’re thinking, that you would open up so I can understand.  All I have to rely on are your words, which I study like a book so that I can begin to get you.  

I know how much you hate it here, because I do too. It sounds so cliche when I say it, but you really are the one keeping me here.  What’s keeping you? When I’ve been trying to tell you my whole life that I need you.  I vowed that someday I would swallow my pride and just say it.  I need your ups and downs, your laugh, your mystery, your eyes.  

This is my last year with you.  Right now, I’m finally writing about you, something that after nine years I’ve not been able to do.  What you are to me, it is something I might never understand, but I know it is something worth keeping.