So now, there are words written only for you in my notebook. They describe that lilting accent of yours that lingers in my own speech, long after you left for the final time. They capture the dreams you always whispered to me – the ones that always seemed further away than the stars twinkling overhead. The stars don’t shine in New York (we knew they were up there somewhere), but light pollution was never enough to stop yours from being seen, from being known. From being carried in the bags that set heavy under the curve of your eyes. Those dreams I never thought were attainable, were tangible, were capable through the hands of a doe-eyed teenager; bright and innocent; suddenly were there, right in front of us.

    I had always thought you were more than most perceived, and I suppose I was kind of right. The light of young aspiration still burned bright across the horizon of your eyes and chased chaos through your bloodstream, but on the nights where you tucked yourself into a cigarette (I wondered what it felt like to choke on your own lungs, and if you were trying to smoke the exhaustion out of your body), I stole away in hopes of forgetting what your fingertips felt like stuttering across the piano of my spine. You always liked experimenting with instruments; seeing as how you could twist the notes to complement any lyric that filtered through your Hispanic laced dialogue.

    So now, there are words written only for you in my notebook. I imagine you reading them to me, your voice curling and melting the pages; flattening them against the plane of your dreams. Something I was always a little too parallel, a little too fixed and spoken, to understand.