The bench

on missing you

For as long as I’ve known life and love to exist in the same space as me, I’ve seen that in every great story there’s always a bench. There is always a bench when it comes to lovers and friends. A bench that holds hard conversations and countless laughs, cradles you to a point where you forget that it’s iron and wood and start treating it like it was built only to hold that version of your life.

I pass by our bench sometimes.

I see the lamppost that I sat across from you on, and the way you told me everything. Every little detail about you that you thought mattered at that time was told in the shade of those trees, in the presence of those squirrels, in the humidity of that weather.

It was the beginning of our despite.

I remember the beads of sweat that rolled down your face in the heat, the Jacarandas blooming like they had decided our walks deserved a more beautiful sky. I remember how our world slowed down in those moments, as if even time understood not to interrupt us. I remember how there was always something more for us to say.

I remember our firsts.

I remember us trying and the pleasant surprises that I could give to you. I think of how badly we wanted to get it right in all the ways that mattered. I think of the days when I was able to extract the 9-year-old you and let him play in the grass while we watched, holding hands. I think that was one of my favorite things about the beginning of loving you, the way you would let go of yourself enough for me to see these parts of you.

I think about our exhibitionism and the way you grew in love and began taking your space. The way you put the world aside and made room for something larger than life. I think about how difficult it must’ve been to stop guarding reality for long enough to let something good happen to us.

It was never really about the bench, if I’m honest. It was about what it held. What it heard. What it watched become so real. It held versions of us that no one else got to see. The ones that were not trying to prove anything or impress anyone. Versions that knew each other with all their imperfections and shortcomings.

Just two people sitting in the middle of their lives and making room for each other.

There’s a time that I’m still trying to navigate the distance from. A time when we weren’t carrying so much, just matching the pink in my pony to the pink in the flowers around us.

Sometimes I catch myself thinking how there is something so uniquely painful about being able to feel the outline of what has shifted, even if it’s temporary. To speak, love, and show up the same way, yet know that it now feels separated by distance. Not absence. Just distance. When you have enough to hold, but not always enough to rest in.

I suppose the bench reminds me of what ease once looked like on us.

It makes me long for the closeness and the effortlessness of those moments. The simplicity of being able to sit beside you without feeling myself reaching for reassurances with both hands. Just you and me.

Missing you is its own religion at this point.

But I don’t sit on that bench without you. And like all great lovers who found each other during times of war, we have a bench that waits for us too.