Motion Picture

Dear Levi,

Sometimes I have no idea what to write you. It’s like there is a huge, empty hole inside my head, all I felt and think is numb. I try my hardest to never look to see you in church, but sometimes, it is inevitable… my soul still knows somehow when you enter the scene. In the brief, painful moments I feel so numb in my head. Maybe I’ve burned out my thinker.

It’s like I’m looking from the outside in on life, watching her live the moments that were mine, live the life I dream of. I watch you move and talk and text and plunge your hands into your pockets.. it’s eaerie, it feels unreal, like slow motion. Like I’ve died and no longer exist in reality. Or maybe that I never existed at all to you. You never look my way, never flinch, never hesitate. I feel so completely invisible, hopelessly trappbed beyond this impenetrable wall of glass. On you go, and her, and life, and my feet are pulling through quicksand of slow motion. Life continued for you so easily, without missing a beat, and it never did for me. I try to make a life, feel anything that feels like “Noelle” again… but she is gone, exisisting somewhere in that reality that was so effortlessly deleted from your desktop of life. She never came back. She sat there at the window table at The West or maybe curled up on the snowy hill overlooking the boy’s dorm, and there she still remains, exiled by your dismissal, a lost soul broken and lost of love.

The life that I’m living now feels so distorted, a cheap counterfeit of Noelle’s life, an impostor hosting her body and mind and trying to convince her it’s better somehow. Most of the time, I leave her and the grief and anguish locked up in the back of my mind and drive on, hands gripping the steering wheel, eyes firmly fixed on what you told me to go do and be. I don’t look for you because I know don’t know you, this Noelle, and so it doesn’t hurt so much that you don’t look at me, because you don’t know me either. And I see her so perfect and smiling at your side and I can’t help but be glad for her happiness. Why shouldn’t she be there at his side? 

But somehow, completely factoring you out of my life, all the people moving around me are just bodies and names. My soul feels only the existence of your soul. Even without you in the picture, there is no picture but you. Am I crazy??

Your star,

Rigel