Already Addressed

What do you do with all the thoughts that arrive already addressed to someone you can no longer tell?

They come without warning.

Something makes you laugh, and you know exactly who would understand. A song begins playing. You notice something beautiful. You remember a story, a private joke, the cadence of their mind.

And the thought forms before you can stop it.

I have to tell you this.

Sometimes it is tenderness. The sudden wish to know how their day has been. Something you want to whisper when the rest of the world is asleep.

Sometimes it is longing.

And sometimes it is heat.

A memory that settles low in your body. A thought that makes your skin warm. The sudden, unmistakable ache of wanting someone and remembering exactly how it felt to be wanted by them.

Once, you would have told them every delicious thought, every wicked little detail. Now, you let it burn quietly inside you.

Maybe that is one of grief’s quietest cruelties.

The relationship ends, but the mind doesn’t immediately learn the new geography.

Neither does the heart.

And the body seems to remember longest of all.

They still turn toward the same person with the laughter, the tenderness, the stories, the desire because for so long, those things had somewhere to go. There was someone on the other side of them, and now there isn’t.

So you carry the words instead.

Until every now and then, a thought appears with such certainty that, for one beautiful, terrible second, you forget.

It arrives warm, intimate, already addressed.

And only then do you remember there is nowhere for it to go.