This Is How You’ll Miss Me

How you’ll miss me? You’ll miss me when you can’t replace me.

You’ll miss me when you hear drops of Jupiter on the radio. You’ll miss me every time your seat belt locks when you come up on a red light too fast. You know I loved it when it did that. When you’re distracted by the all too familiar smell of vanilla perfume. The way it soaked into your senses every time you kissed my neck, giving me goosebumps like it was my first time. The way my breath would escape through my lips when you touched me, entering your veins and soaking into every crevice of your body.

Miss me loudly. Miss me over the roar of the crowd and cleats on the dugout when my angels are up by 7. When you realize you’re sitting behind third base at a baseball game when you don’t even like baseball. But it reminds you of my smile. The one you saw every time I talked about it. The smile that would interrupt in the middle of wandering hands and a heavy kiss.

Miss me when you have another girl exhaling your name on your neck. When you’re kissing her and pretending it’s me. Miss the way I undressed you with my hands, my eyes. The way I undressed you physically, mentally, emotionally. Stripped you down to your naked thoughts. Shredding every layer exposing you down to your raw memories of childhood.

Miss me in the month of July. Over the fireworks and hues of bright colors in the night sky. Almost as beautiful as the pain you feel when you think about me.

The beautiful pain of knowing you were lucky enough to have me, but naïve enough to let me go. 

A pain as though I dropped your heart from the top of the empire state building onto the cold, wet pavement below. I stepped on it in my dirty black hightops, followed by a dance in my shiny red stilettos. (I don’t actually own shiny red stilettos) Heart still beating. You wish it would just stop. To make the aching come to an end. But it doesn’t. You feel it all. You’ll realize missing me is the worst pain. Not because I hurt you. Because you chose to walk away. Because you did this to yourself.

I bet you didn’t think you would miss me. I bet you didn’t think the thought of my hands in someone else’s hair would make you sick to your stomach. I bet you can still remember the last time I had my fingers gripping at the back of your neck, clutching below your hair line. Aching in any attempt to close any gap between our bodies.

I bet you thought missing me would be easy. Like you wouldn’t miss the way I played with the callouses on your hands distractedly. Like it wouldn’t hurt to see I’ve moved on.

Like the Bruce Springsteen lyric, “There were ghosts in the eyes of all the [girls] you sent away.”