frozen particles

The people you love become ghosts inside you, and like this you keep them alive.

--Unknown

I went back to Chicago this weekend and met up with people I were with only a few months ago, and for the most part they remained unchanged. But one person, I think, did recede into a ghost inside me, because he no longer feels the same way he did. Of course, selfishly, I wish he would go back to these feelings of the past, so I could always come back and figure out what we could be. I don't know why it didn't occur to me that we had an expiration date, of course we would, of course we would be subject to the same laws that bind everyone else. Under the always beautiful, always familiar Chicago sky, our expanding distance seemed more pronounced than ever. Our breaths came in between us and froze into frosted particles, even though they had come out so warm just a moment before. I wanted to fill the silences with something, but there was no way to push these awkward thoughts out. So I just let the silence freeze. Along with our breath. Along with our possibilities.

I wanted to fly faster than our plane back to Chicago, faster than the speed of light, back to the Chicago of 2011, when times were green and golden, and I would say, let's try us now because things are not always going to be this way, because I have seen the expiration date and I want to use up our pent up potential before then.

That would have been a failed experiment, I think. It too, would have become a ghost very quickly. Still, in my insatiable desire to have everything, I wanted every mistake as well.

**