Even though I know my old love is truly dead, I have a hard time accepting it in the back of my brain. Every morning when I open my email, I halfway expect a message from him, even though we never emailed, only wrote stacks of love letters on paper. It’s absurd, I know. Still–I think I’m secretly looking for signs that he’s here somewhere nearby. As if there’s an internet cafe in the afterlife where he could tap out a quick hello/I still love you. (Surely they’ve upgraded from Ouija boards by now.) In Starbucks last weekend, I was sitting on the window sill, patiently waiting for my coffee, watching couples snog in line and reminding myself that, “I’ll never walk down a street in a strange city and run into him, I’ll never have a chance to say I’m sorry, I’ll never know for sure if he ever thought of us.” Trying to grind down hope and spread the ashes. When I walked up to get my latte, there was a display of cups I’d never seen before, all imprinted with the word, REINCARNATE. The rational, enlightened part of me knows it was just a clever way to market cups made of recycled material, but the part of me that wants to believe in magic and miracles hopes it’s a sign that we are all recycled material and we’ll mix and mingle again another day, in another time and place, in a most unexpected way.
