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Rejected Endings
To what you’re about to read
I asked “When you told your friends you don’t love me anymore, how did they feel?” and you said “Not surprised.”
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Three days later you posted a photo and your friends were like “You’ve never looked happier!!!” and they were right.
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My friends don’t ask me where you are anymore because they know I don’t know.
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I guess we were ships crashing in the night.
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So now my memory of you is like money in a glass case in the sea: beautiful, untouchable, distorted, seductive, sinking. Or maybe it’s money dropped out of a helicopter into the sea and I’m on some twisted game show frantically grasping for bills and trying not to drown.
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Because in your letters you quoted the poem but never its ending:
Watching the wind whisk the money away
out to sea. Watching the case splash
below — mystical, insignificant —
instantly erased by waves.
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It’s like I went to the beach and scavenged sticks and stones and red seagrass and self-ashored kelp and fashioned a replica of your hair and now I’m sailing the globe searching for moon-faced bald women with fangs.
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And it’s so corny but I kept thinking about the Third Eye Blind song that’s like “How’s it gonna be / when you don’t know me anymore?” and I guess the answer is like this.
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