Negative

I imagine you and me alone in a darkroom, going through the negatives, picking which pictures worth to be developed only to learn that we like them all. But that would be a little silly because you own a digital camera. I guess I just need a reason to be with just you, even if it's only in my head. A reason to stand side by side,. A reason to put our faces close together, looking at the tiny, eerie reverse-coloured version of ourselves. A reason to ask permissions, hollering 'behind!' while trying to move in this space; cramped and badly lit by the blood-red light. A reason to accidentally graze our skins and elbows. A reason to be just us.

But apparently my fantasy is mine and mine alone, not yours. By the time we finished processing the photos, you had enough of this room, I suppose. I reckon this tiny room is becoming too suffocating, these chemicals burning your nose. This endless strip of film may become too disorienting. Maybe it's too confusing seeing ourselves in cyan, yellow and magenta. Maybe you need to break free, not stuck here forever.

Or maybe I should just quit lying to myself. Maybe I'm the one who's suffocating you. Maybe I'm the one who's confusing you. Maybe I'm the one you need to break free from.

After all, this is my own made up fantasy. One constructed from old memories, of which I'm stubbornly trying to construed as the truth, when it's entirely and inappropriately false. A fantasy I cannot even uphold steady, collapsing and crumbling on it's own like a souffle dipped with a spoon. Keeping you prisoner under this wobbly walls is just not right, downright creepy.

If you're reading this (you're definitely not), just know that I can't no longer be sad. Instead I'm laughing right now at my own silliness. My perpetual stupidity of wanting the past to be the present. You're just a fleeting moment, that once in a while got caught up in the whirlpool of the wind of life. A whiff of the momentous moments of our short-lived happiness.

This next statement would be contradicting my newly-confessed fantasy of you, but hear me out: I know better now that we're just not compatible. We're the inverse of Deadpool and his gal, our curves just don't fit each other like a puzzle. In retrospect, it's much or less like I'm trying to fit into a glass slipper when I'm just Cinderella's step sister. I know, even my examples are weird and felt forced, right? Like how I adamantly wanting you to use film camera in my dream when you obviously using digital. We are like a double negative (excuse the photography pun), I thought it sounded right when grammatically it can't never be correct. Yes, that's a grammar pun I just made right there.

So, now you see how the first paragraph is melancholic and the last is a desperate attempt at being humorous, that's a definite sign of me holding back my tears. So, till then, my old sweet, inappropriately fantasized friend. Goodbye.