Dale

and i wonder if i were to lay next to you one more time if you would wrap your arms around me like nothing had changed, if we’d forget the year we spent apart kissing the wrong people just to feel a little less lonely. or if we would be separated by too much time and too much hurt for you to ever be able to reach me again.

“Absent”, first spit itself out of my kindergarten mouth after the name of a missing friend during classroom attendance. Absence is a measurement. It’s the empty humans measure with all things important to them. Absence spells like a brutal telegram bearing bad news, the possibility of absence is a rat trap I’m terrified of walking into. I believed what Darwin said about the survival of the fittest and of every species that lives only a human once watched her children laugh by the fire- then grazed her fingers in soot after they slept and drew them on the rock where the moonlight fell. I know what is today probably won’t be tomorrow so I take my campfire moments and put them in a poem. Life doesn’t break its rules even if I do so I become a caveman painting the feeling when you grab my hand to bite it but give a soft kiss instead. every time life and I play cards she gets all the aces while I, in my trembling heart hold a card called ‘hope’ and before my turn, I scribble in brackets, your name.”

“I will love you with the dust of who I was, with the skin I am now, and with the bones that will one day decorate my tomb.”