It is the Nineteenth day of may and I am smiling at the bus stop

It's the nineteenth day of May and I am sitting at the bus stop.

It's the nineteenth day of May and I am smiling while sitting at the bus stop. It's the nineteenth day of May and I am smiling about being hopelessly happy while sitting at the bus stop. Almost six months ago I made a shrine out of pain. Lit candles at the altar of his ghost, whispered his name like prayer and poison and something in between. Almost six months ago I made the mistake of calling his absence presence, as if longing was a kind of companionship, as if his memory could be enough to keep me warm. LaRocca writes "Heaven is a dark room, there is nothing there for us." Foolishly I thought he was heaven, my heaven. My velvet dark room, my forbidden thing, my pretty promise of ruin. I romanticized my own undoing and called it intimacy. I made poetry out of red flags and pretended the bleeding was art. I thought the ache meant I was alive. LaRocca was right if you want to go by that definition then he was heaven, a dark room with nothing there for anyone.

Now almost six months later I realize he wasn't heaven, he wasn't even hell. He was a footnote, a lowercase ghost, a cautionary tale I stopped telling. He wasn't a chapter. He was a badly written prologue- No, wait. That would be too gentle. He wasn't even a fucking footnote.

I will rewrite all of him into what it really was, into postmortem lacerations and then close the book forever. Maybe I'm a cynic, maybe I'm vengeful. Maybe I still fantasize about sending him an invoice for the therapy bills. Maybe I hope he sees me smiling and it ruins his day. Maybe I want that. Maybe I deserve that.

But also, maybe I'm someone who found her smile again. Maybe I'm the girl at the bus stop, stretched out in the afternoon sun, hair sticking to lip balm, humming a song she's forgotten the lyrics to. Maybe I am sitting here like I have no memory of being broken open like a pomegranate, seeds scattered across a year's worth of poetry and sleepless nights. Maybe I am sitting here smiling at a message like I don't remember the pain, because I don't.

Right now, I'm free.

Right now, the sky is just the sky. The air is just air. My heart is just a heart and not a mausoleum. There are no ghosts at this bus stop, only me. And I am smiling and that's the fucking point.