Bad Weather

My new boyfriend called me “bab”,

Now I’m the sickest I’ve been in months.

You’ll never talk to me again, will you?

And why should you. I never reached out

After that all happened. Years too late, my

Mind races and wonders what it was like

To wait by the phone

Hoping the person who told you every day

“I love you”

Would come after you, would apologize

Or at the very least say SOMETHING

What was it like, I wonder and worry,

To wait MONTHS, then YEARS, for something that never came?

And when did you finally stop waiting?

I don’t deserve the air in my lungs

I don’t deserve the memories of you

And yet to not be here

Would be more respite than I could ever hope to earn.

I can’t fix it. Death can’t fix it.

At its end, years past.

I am not the same as I was.

I will not be the same again.

This is where Hannah

Feels like I only get credit for the things I do wrong. When I mess up, no one else ever has questions about where the blame should fall.

Likewise, no one has questions when I do something right. Instead, they assume the person responsible is whoever is closest in proximity to me. I never get the credit for what I do well. I am never credited for the help I offer or the slack I pick up.

And despite only getting credit for bad and never for good, people never stop asking me for more and more and more.

Almost like they know I’m the one to be credited and simply don’t care to. I’m just a receptacle to pull shit out of. I’m just a resource for you to mine.

I’ll be using this space as a diary, and as a space for venting all the sad shit I can’t swallow anymore and can’t put anywhere else.

That I spent the night dreaming we were together again

I almost forgot how you smiled at me

How the smile reached your eyes

I almost forgot how you laughed off our past

And pulled me into your chest

Like you used to

I’d almost forgotten, and it wasn’t until now, stood flat footed in the kitchen

Making carrot soup, stirring in dollops of miso

That I remembered

That I realized leaning my face into the steam and curling myself around the warmth of my stove

Was not the first time I’d been warm today

Was not the first time I felt at home today

And now that I’ve remembered

I am out in the cold again

In the silence of fresh fallen snow

Uncommon for this time of year

This snow-cradled midnight welcomes

A new beginning as eyes refocus

On December, on the hours mothers labored

To bring us into this world

A world people both dread, and dream of, leaving

Today, our vision is better than a newborn’s but not by much

The white and chocolate brown bark of trees blends, blurs into the charcoal grey skies

A minimalist marble of neutral color

How children would’ve fought to see this midnight

How fascinating they would find the sky and the way it never gets fully dark

Adult now, we get to explore the newness

Of winter and of the first magic I knew

Of cold and of heat

Snowbanks as tall as a Buick

An actual fire crackling in the hearth

Cocoa poured into snowmen cups

With peppermint spoons

All over again

This December

Everything we have known of life

Finds its way back to the earth

I wonder what more I will know

Who I will meet

What I might do

How I’ll leave tracks behind

In new places, latent as

So why haven’t I found you yet?

Or regulating my own body by being close to someone else’s

I’ve always listened to your heart when I rest my head on your chest

I can’t mature past these simple comforts

Words can’t do for me what quiet,

Hot skin can

In the second week of April and I’m tired

I am ready to wash winter out of my hair

And let spring coil and curl as the air warms

The trees hesitate to bud and I can’t blame them

But day by day, life peeks its head outside

And the sun doesn’t run from the sky

Smoke wafting from long canes of green apple incense that your mom burned

In the shade of a four seasons room in the house you grew up in

Now drifting through the stairwell of your apartment building

Fifteen years and fifty miles away

And mom nowhere in sight

workers joke among themselves as a

family labors under a swaddling of heather clouds

to protect memories from rain and vultures alike.

Our energy dissipates but the pile grows.

The coffeemaker lays on its side in the grass.

Brother, sisters, mother orbit the mass-

supermassive-

and we all agree that the house must be empty by now, because

here’s our whole world dumped on the corner-