More issues than Vogue

Everyone writes about the Moon and the Sun being lovers but I don’t think that’s true. Maybe at some point they were, but now they just go on sort of like we do: aware of each other’s existence, fully knowing one cannot exist without the other, but wishing it didn’t have to be that way.

Ghost town heart and suddenly every place I've loved you  is a burial ground now. The people  I’ve been are forgotten children  left on someone else’s doorstep. No pulse left to speak of in this emergency room body. When the doctors listen for what’s wrong, their foreheads grow worry lines. Tell me my ache’s got no name. Just a war inside me  where all the soldiers are writing  to a home that was destroyed in a fire, and we didn’t make it out the way we should have. A faded note stapled to a tree warns that there are parts of our story still missing. No number to call. No address to send the  corpses of what once was. Just a poem we read together once about a moon that fell into the ocean because it was tired of holding itself up. Underneath, scribbled in the sloppy rush of your handwriting, the words: ‘that’s kind of what this feels like for me.’ Old love, I’m sorry the nights have turned so dark for you. I hope it only means  that you sleep well. If it helps, I still dream of you. Wake up to the smell of smoke around me every single day.

Making love was never about you and me in a bed. We made love whenever we held hands.

marry me. let’s spend our week nights eating cereal on the floor when there is a perfectly fine table behind us. we can go to the movies and sit in the back row just to make out like kids falling in love for the first time. marry me. we’ll paint the rooms of our house and get more paint on us than the walls. we can hold hands and go to parties we end up ditching to drink wine out of the bottle in the bathtub. marry me. and slow dance with me in our bedroom with an unmade bed and candles on the nightstand. let me love you forever. marry me.

Scientists, somewhere, are still looking for stillness. They don’t know the silence of your ghosts. This is the love they were trying to tell us about. At night I listen to my dead heart and name it after a dead country. The birds in my blood stop mid-flight. When I think of you, a war ends. You tell me about the time your world went quiet. How you howled at love like a moon. You warn me of your dark, and I stay. I stay, and I swallow your shadows whole.

Let me explain pain. Pain is waking up at the same time each night because something hit you so hard it was engrained into your body clock. Pain is knowing you ripped apart someone’s soul so it tears yours but you tear it further just to attempt to be at the same place they are. Pain is knowing, knowing you are, knowing you are but having to wait for everyone else to notice. But love, love love love, love is…