I don’t really know who I am without you.

I am starting to forget your face. I think this is how we are supposed to be, but I can never be sure because whenever I hear your voice or sense those eyes I think I might be wrong. You are beautiful in a way that I cannot contain and could never reach out and grasp and will never intimately understand. I dream about you more often than I should. I like to pretend there was something between us: not a spark or a firework, but a show of lights and colours. I think I am making the right decision in moving on from whatever this may have been, but there are some nights when he is lying beside me and I am thinking of you, hoping you might be thinking of me, and praying my hope is not wasted.

Thank You

He told me how he had missed me -  achingly, desperately - promised everything would be different this time, better. He asked me to spend more time mending our relationship, begged me to rethink the way we ended up: almost more than friends, but not quite lovers. I think he's lying about his feelings. If he wasn't, perhaps I'd tell him I used to believe in our ever-after. My phone buzzes and I find myself hoping it's him. The déjà vu crashes onto my shoulders, pierces my skin and fills my heart with blood. I imagine this is how he would treat me if I'd let him. This poem is shattered glass  and so am I. It is torn at its edges and stained in the centre. It misses him the way I do, the way he doesn't miss me too. My heart will always drop when there is no message from you waiting for me. I don't know why.

I am torn between needing to see you and never wanting to see you again. It is a feeling my heart is used to.

Whatever This Is, I Hope It Helps

The thing is not to write what no one else could have written, but to write what only you could have written. I recently found this fragment in one of my old notebooks. The person who wrote that couldn’t have known what would happen: how time can hold itself against you, how a voice hollows, how words you once loved can wither on the page.

You are a mouth I want to laugh with and a heart I want to fall with. You are a memory I want to lose myself in and never find my way home from.

There is mango juice dripping down my chin and I wish you were here to see it. I think this is what it means to be happy that somebody exists even though they do not exist with you, but I never understood the power of joy until I met you and I’m not sure I know how to do it without you. I can’t remember the last time I smiled like this: my mouth overflowing with starlight and my hands sticky with moon dust and you, whispering into my hair from a table thousands of miles away, not even realising you’re talking to me, never knowing the power of your joy over mine.

Close your eyes and take a deep breath and everything will be okay in the morning. Or perhaps it won’t be. But that’s not what’s important right now. The only thing that matters is you, listening to the sound of my voice, eyes closed and ears open and heart willing to love one last time. I can’t promise that things will be okay - maybe they never will be - but you won’t know unless you try.

I imagine you leaving when I cannot sleep. I do not stutter. Sometimes the rain hits my windows hard enough to make you stay and sometimes the sun shines too brightly for your freckled skin. I do not cry. You hold my hands tighter than the day we first met and look into my eyes with every ounce of love I’ve poured into your mouth and you promise that somebody will see the moonlight in my hair the way you once did. I do not beg you to stay. It was an honour to have known you, the ins and outs of you, the beautiful and the pure and the utterly raw of you. I do not promise we’ll stay friends. It always ends the same way: the rain stops, the sun disappears behind the clouds, you wipe the tears and no more follow. Our love is a little stronger and our hearts are a little wider and our poetry is a little sadder. We both know how this ends, but I’ve never stayed awake long enough to find out. I hope I never have to.

When they ask me to describe heartbreak, this is what I will say: Our love ran for the hills and never stopped to look back. Our love filled itself with silence and promised that everything would be okay. Our love knew heartache like no other. Our love never wanted to leave. Our love never learned how to stay.