Lindsay Gloade-Raining Bird

It wasn’t that there were stars in your eyes, it was that it was all you could see. Twinkling lights and your own name blinking in and out like a vacancy sign on that old hotel that kept advertising colour TV long after it stopped being a selling point. It was like that with love—realizing everything I thought was special about you was just the basics for most people. Telling the truth and housing hurt for each other like old furniture with not enough room. That’s all I was, in the end. I was your storage facility. Your long-distance U-Haul. I was the place you put everything you had no immediate need for but didn’t want to give up. All those things that you thought you couldn’t part with, until parted, are forgotten. I don’t want to be the dust on your picture frames but that’s better than the dark, better than nothing at all. Better than the whispers of what once was—all your old suitcases packed full of ghosts, lingering like old love letters. Like the versions of ourselves we used to want to be. ‘Til we knew better.