Someone told me once not to keep my feelings inside. Words are only any help if you speak them, but I’m lousy at words, and you’ve never been a very good listener. So I’ve composed my thoughts into numbers to describe to you the finite set of days that define who you are to me.

We met at one. You were seventeen, and I was infatuated by you the minute my eyes met yours. They were an emerald color, I’d told you I  liked them, and the smile it brought to your face was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. You asked for my number, with the promise to call me the next day. But you called me that very night.

You asked me out at eleven, but I never granted you a yes until seventeen. Thank you for never stopping, I’d hate to be given up on by someone new.

Our second date was at twenty one, when you showed up at my door just shy of midnight with a cooler full of wine and a bag of snacks. I’m not quite sure where you took me that night, while we laid on an open field and counted the stars. But I do remember the taste of your lips when I finally kissed you back at some early hour of twenty two. And I do remember the way it felt like butterflies learning to fly for the first time in my stomach, and then wondering where in the hell they had came from, for i’d never thought to have them before.

I don’t recall the exact day I finally fell for you. It might have been somewhere around twenty nine, or perhaps thirty two.  I think I must have been falling for an outrageous amount of days at time, with no destination until I’d found myself in the passenger seat of your truck, windows down with the radio playing softly in the background. I felt my heart pounding inside of me as I looked over you at a red light. You smiled down to me before placing a kiss to the back of my hand.

I realized that night that I loved you. While driving to nowhere, the only excuse being that the city wasn’t sleeping, so why should we be?

Except I’m a coward for love.

I never got the chance to tell you I loved you before the fearful night of thirty seven. It didn’t feel like crying, it felt like echoed sobs into the void as I watched you turn away, taking a piece of me as you went. I wanted to hate you. I wanted to hate you so bad, but I never could.

I wanted to scream into oblivion, so on fifty eight I finally willed myself from the comfort of my bed. I have no idea how I found myself anywhere at all that night, but I remember still wanting to hate you so much that it hurt.

It hurt. It hurt like the rug burn I got when I turned eleven and fell down the stairs to my bedroom. It hurt like the way it felt to watch my mother cry when my father had left us. It dawned on me how much my life was resembling a revolving door in the moment.

People always leave.

But I still loved you when I thought of the good times we spent within each others presence. I still loved you when your favorite song came on at a restaurant, the melody enveloping me in a blanket of suffocation, demanding to be heard, to be felt. I still loved you when you weren’t there for me the night my grandmother died, when I wanted nothing more than to be swept into your arms and lulled to sleep with promises that it was going to be okay, even though I’d know they were to be broken. For I would never really be okay.

And I still love you today. One Hundred and Eighty Seven days since you left me, without ever looking back.