Spectrum

This is the bomblike feeling of having cared for someone who did not care for me at all. This is me having trusted someone who did not believe me when I told them a friend of theirs had wronged me. This is the sudden certainty that time would never change that unrequited trust in spite of recurring conversation. In spite of supposed recurring remembrance. I thought I had the past on my side with all these memories as credentials, but recurrence does not turn the old into new. I didn’t know it —or I didn’t want to know it—, but I was just a faint apparition, a harmless ghost climbing the same flight of stairs night after night.