Personal Narrative: Where Are You Dead

Today is one of those rare days in which it is raining and I’m sitting on the windowsill waiting for a sign. Something that says ‘move on’. There is still a part of me that hopes every day that you're alive and I haven't found you yet. I will have searched the far corners of the earth before I let myself believe you dead. I dream of you every night, then wake with the bitter taste of regret fresh in my mouth. You abandoned me. You have marooned me on this earth, and it is dark without your light by my side. All that fills my mind is when you were still beside me. I distinctly recall one summer when we were not quite children anymore and still too young to be adults. It was raining so hard that the streets were flooded for the first time in eighty years, and you had insisted on escaping to the desert.
The colors of the desert ran across the canvas of my mind, smudged from the water. Your vision was focused on the horizon, my eyes focused on you. That day we danced and ran and screamed till our lungs gave out, the desert mud staining the soles of our bare feet. Occasionally I believe I can still smell the rain, the mud, you. It is on days like these that I remember vividly, the colors of you violent and saturated. I feel the presence of you in the silence between morning and night, in the moments after a question is asked but before it is answered. I understand that you live inside my head and nowhere else, your address on a street in my mind. But if you do return, I am