My fingers are covered in dry paint.
            The you I miss, I haven’t seen in months. Since June, I keep staying up until four in the morning, waiting for you to call me and say something, anything to make it all feel a little less like it’s falling apart.
            Since June, I haven’t picked up a paintbrush. I keep thinking about the days you spent painting walls and canvasses that no one would ever see. Your fingers would be covered in dried paint, and you would have on that flannel you always wore. It was red and gray and every color in between. Everything about you was different then.
            That was when you made me fall in love with all the things I had never thought about. You made me fall in love with art and painting, no matter how terrible I was at it. You made me fall in love with classical music. The way you played Beethoven’s Fugue a minor on guitar was the reason I stayed awake until four in the morning. You played it over and over and over, losing track of time. Your fingers must have hurt like hell from it, but you became someone you weren’t on the surface, and it was easier to see you at four in the morning than it had ever been before.
            I hate saying I miss you, but I do.
            Back in March, we both had our birthdays and you finally got your driver’s license. On my birthday, we spent three hours blowing up as many balloons as we could, just to leave them on the floor of my room. Ten days later, on your birthday, we painted one of the walls in your room. We painted the universe on it because you said there was some sort of poetic masterpiece in the idea of infinity, not in the word itself. It was one of those things you said early in the morning when we should have been asleep and every word hung in the air.
            We both had problems, but somehow, you were the only person who could really get to me. You could crawl under my skin when you touched me, your words could find their way into my bones, and you meant more to me than anyone else ever had. I’d like to think I was the same way for you, and I miss you.
            January, before we had painted your wall, was when you almost kissed me. The bite of winter caught me, and our breath was visible in the air. I wore a white beanie and you wore a black one, but we had stolen each other’s so many times I can’t remember which was mine in the first place. We stood outside to feel the wind and hold on to the short days of winter. It was like we knew something bad was coming in the spring. Still, until the spring, you held your hands cold against my cheek and almost kissed me.
            I spent so much time playing Tchaikovsky on piano in February because I couldn’t stand to think about you. My fingers hurt from Swan Lake’s overture and I broke a million paintbrushes from painting over top of the same canvas over and over, never satisfied.
            Unspoken, we blamed January and February on the cold and three feet of snow. That way, March went on the way it did. After our birthdays, April hit us hard.
            April, it rained, and you fell in love with me. That was the way you were. You loved me when the rain poured and things fell apart, and I was always there. If you had said it, painted it on the universe in your room, I might have known you meant it. In the best way, you were the kind of person who was hard to trust. I had never known if you were capable of loving someone, or if you were just broken enough to think you could.
            May was anticipation and June was the last innocence.
            July became a mess of apologies and hypothetical questions. It held more hot summer air than words that could fill it.
            It was never supposed to end like this. The way you were, you loved me when the rain poured and things fell apart, but I fell in love with you in the sunshine, and you had disappeared by the time I could tell you. I guess our timing was off. We could never get it right, we could never be perfect.
            I miss you. Kicking each other under the table and wasting countless hours on our jokes, laughing like we had nothing to lose, it was all a piece of us.
                I miss the way we were okay, before we both went off and fell apart on our own. Together, somehow we were a little bit better every day. Maybe it was because there were so many pieces to us. We weren’t simple, we were a mess of paints and sheet music and every stupid thing we had ever done. I would take my coffee cold and you liked yours hot as hell. You were carefree and I was cautious. You were a painter, I was a writer, but I could paint the stars on my ceiling and you would be there to point out every one of my favorite constellations.
            In August, you said someone one would love me the way you had. You still say you aren’t right for me, but I don’t care what is right anymore. I don’t want to let this go, to let the winter wash it away. I don’t want to spend weeks playing Tchaikovsky on piano until I break the keys. There’s no use in someone else loving me the way you did if I never stopped loving you. I want your hidden gallery and the flannel you wore.
            Your hand in mine and the dried paint, songs without words, just strings and keys ringing in our ears, we could have been better. I want the way you played Beethoven’s Fugue a Minor on guitar, and I want your four in the morning anecdotes.
            I’m done telling myself it is wrong to love you. I want the broken bits and the better bits, the rain and the sunshine. I’d give you the universe, but all I can do is paint it.
            I miss you. I miss the way we were okay, and I think I understand it – that thing you said at four in the morning. There’s some kind of perfection in the way infinity is so unattainable.