I call your name.

​

I woke up in the morning and noticed that you were no longer here. Just some moments ago, you were breathing peacefully as you slept. I still feel your warmth on the sheets, wrinkled from when you left the bed.
Or perhaps you were already gone a long time ago and were just a figment of my imagination. Perhaps we may not have met at all, and it was all a dream.
If you only appeared in my dreams, I wonder what all these things are that remind me of you.

 

The billboard stands among the bristling skyscrapers as random images appear and disappear - beer, chocolate, cars, and faces of women. I can see it from the window of this room. 
If I can buy that billboard, you mumbled, I will erase all the images and make it a blank board.
Then I will let a single bird fly it, I said.
We sat side by side on the bench by the window, following the image of a bird flying in the square shaped sky among the canyon of buildings. The image of the bird that you saw in your mind’s eye was the one I let go in the billboard. We both followed the same image and its frail wings.
I certainly felt your right arm under my left arm, or so I thought. Perhaps it was my right arm embracing my left.

 

If my body was made of candy, you mumbled again, I will be left with nothing after pieces of me are taken one by one by others and put into their mouths. I am just a candy wrapper scrunched by someone’s hand and discarded on the side of a road.  
If it was me, I would adorn the wrappers in silver and gold starlike hues and also dye them in different colors like a flower garden.
We opened the silver wrapper and put the candy in our mouths. A cheap artificial cherry flavor spread over my tongue. I wrote your name with a marker on the glitter wrapper so that I won’t forget you. Or perhaps, I wrote my own name on it myself.

 

I came to realize that you were a blank poster that had nothing on it, a last piece of the jigsaw puzzle that will never finish without it, a lightbulb that is about to go out and disappear, a shadow lurking behind the curtain. 
You were never a part of my world. 
We never met, so we did not part ways.

 

Your name is “Absence.”
I call your name that is permanently stuck to my memory, as if I am reciting a melancholy poem in a quiet, almost silent voice.