Before I had talked to you and heard your voice, I heard you sing. I fell in love with that voice, and told you as much, and you brushed it off, saying that I likely played it up in my mind so that it sounded exactly how I wanted it to. And then I fell in love with you, and the songs meant that much more. Someone asked me if you’d had a song written about me yet, as our hands curled under the table, but you hadn’t, and you never will. And now we don’t have anything to talk about.

So now, when I hear them, your songs sound just like everyone else’s songs, which is I suppose how they are meant to be. I relate to them, and sing along, thinking less and less of the voice as a person I once knew, but as a voice I am a great fan of, and like musicians do, I know that it will be given to the whole world, and that it was never mine to have for myself. It hurts, but I like the hurt now, I embrace it. It’s a hurt I am most familiar with.

Which is why we listen to sad songs. We feel most alive in the moments of someone else’s lament, and it becomes our lament as well. Not all of your songs were sad. They held a hope out, a longing, that I myself still hold, though not so far out as yours. When I want to remember how much you meant to me, or how you made me feel without knowing it, I play them, but not all the time like I used to, when it was a placebo for your voice when I couldn’t have it. I have almost completely forgotten, even, what your hand felt like when it first reached for mine on the beach, but I will never forget your voice.

And it doesn’t make me cry, anymore.

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