Let's talk about the letter x.
It's one of the weirdest letters we have in the English alphabet. It's a prized letter in the game of scrabble. It's a stumper for some kindergarteners who need to know that one word that starts with it to move up a grade. It's a symbol for a spot. Sometimes it's treasure, sometimes it's a target. Sometimes, it's a word. Sometimes it's a rating of a thrill or a cheap way to get off alone with some tissues. Sometimes it makes things extra small, and sometimes it makes them extra large. Or sometimes it's a way to describe someone.
Ex.
Like an ax to the wood we severed into thousand of splinters. I never thought I'd call you by that letter. I had a different future in mind. One with yellow green and white. One with your forehead pressed against mine as I pushed out creation. One with a chalk board wall full of poetry, lyrics, and sketches of light houses with suns rising in the background.
Now all I see is a big red x over all those dreams.
My treasure map is torn and burned and I can only see the target, but will never find the way to your heart again. My scrabble board is missing letters, and as I search for a way to forget them I keep putting down the letters to your name. I can't move on, like a child stuck behind their innocence and unable to comprehend what is next. I have to only imagine our bodies touching like those two thin lines on a paper. Intersecting like a comet to the atmosphere, colliding but burning up with terrible destruction.
My poetry doesn't have rhythm, and the rhyme has gone awry. All I keep seeing are ******* x's over every line I write. Because none of them put me and you and love together again.
The letter x is so strange. It's a weird thing we chose it to be a way to describe the end of something. One line going one way, the other a different way. But somewhere they meet and for the brief encounter there is hope that the lines will curve into love. But the lines have to move on, and so do we.
