wtv

1. I wasn’t in love with you anymore, but god, this knocked the wind out of me. 2. You were just here. 3. You were just here. 4. Do you remember? The frozen food pressed to your shoulder, the way you shook with the knowledge of a barely avoided death? 5. My mouth. Yours. 6. I had been struggling with my old poems about you. You know, you were the first one I ever wrote. I had some questions for you, Cleveland. I suppose I don’t have them anymore. 7. It isn’t even seeing you kiss her that’s the problem. It’s that you share a table. 8. Maybe “wife” bothers me, too. I know how that word sounds, coming from you. Remember? Those long drives? Perhaps I still exist as your heart when you hit the road. 9. You still exist as mine when I hit the words. 10. I couldn’t read them aloud anymore, the poems. That old pain. It didn’t exist. We had chased it away with chocolate and cherries. Still, you occupy a shelf in the bright. In the cold . 11. You always have been impossibly careless with my heart. With my new lives, all of them. 12. There’s a Smiths song – if you were reading my texts I would send you it – it goes: and I’m not happy / and I’m not sad. I’m not sad, seeing you happy. She looks as full of light as I used to when you kissed me. I am glad for her. I know what you have to give. 13. It’s the loss of our friendship. More a removal. A reopened scar, from the last time. Remember, how we were friends? We’ve been so good at it. I can’t believe you won’t hear from me now. I couldn’t believe you wouldn’t hear from me, then. You know the words.  14. I just wanted to wish you well. I just. I just wanted to be what I always have been. Yours, in whatever form we decide. 15. Nearly two years since we met and you still find new ways to let me down. I think it impresses me more than it wounds. 16. You told me all about her, remember? We discovered we had both loved ghosts, since the last time you cried on my couch. Do you remember? The things that we allow to haunt us take root in the end. I need to change my sheets. 17. I wonder if I am the ghost now. The woman you never had the courage to keep. Do I haunt you, darling? I can hear your voice saying yes. Feel the reach of your arms as I spin out of them, laughing. Do I echo? 18. You kissed me like you used to, the last time. You will again, the next. You always do. 19. In a poem I never got the chance to read you, I said that you exist suspended in time. In flashes of white sheets. Bathed in orange light on the Golden Gate Bridge. Spinning me around on a cold February evening. One year ago today. 20. One year ago today, you laid next to me. We cried about something that doesn’t matter anymore. It didn’t matter then, either. 21. Do you remember the words? Of that last song at what we thought was the last breakfast. You sat me on your knee. 22. Your hands shook as you held me tight. I put my lips to your ear. Do you remember? The words. Say them with me. 23. In my own sick way / I’ll always stay true to you.

We were silent. Poised. Proud. No use in causing chaos when it was everywhere. I can’t apologize for my hypocrisy until you do for your absence from reality. In a photo of us from the last time we were together - I am thinner than you. I never want to see you again.

Before you, I didn’t know anything about suffering. I thought I knew, but I knew nothing. It’s the pain I’m in love with. I don’t love you anymore.

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not – this is the beginning of writing.

I’m competent enough at my job that now I can think of you AND break a french press at the same time. I tell Danny I should wear its teeth around my neck as a warning to all other french presses and he just takes the broom away from me. Now I can think of you AND not clean broken glass at the same time.

Doesn’t that astonish you. You did want me. Say it again.

I remember when you said being with me is like being alone with company. 
My friend Sarah wrote a poem about pink ponies.
 I’m scared you’re my pink pony. Hers is dead. It is really sad. You’re not dead. You live in Ohio, or Washington, or Wherever. You are a shadow my body leaves on other girls.

“You talk crazy anymore and I’ll leave.”

And I would like to see you walk off the face of the earth because you are all that’s wrong with my life and I need you and I claim you.

In my dream, I built a funeral pyre. For myself, you understand. I thought I had suffered enough. I thought this was the end of my body: fire seemed the right end for hunger; they were the same thing.