you have always been the place

please don’t watch me rush to plaster over the cracks in my veneer

I don't know where The Writer sleeps. I wonder if she hides in the attic. I wonder if she sleeps most of the week and only moves when her footsteps can be muffled by the groans of the house bending to the midwestern windstorms. Maybe she bought the house on the corner. Maybe she creeps across the road between street light flickers, scales the tree next to my window, and whispers her dreams into mine. Maybe her retreating footfalls on the packed dirt are the reason I wake up at 1:30 am every night. Could be she's a stalker, following just far enough away for me to not notice, except for those times when I think I see a white cat in my periphery but turn and nothing is there. Or what if she died. What if she leaped out of my body on that bitter April day and drowned herself in Colden Pond. What if that's why this body felt so empty that day. What if she got bored, being trapped under the ice with the overgrown goldfish and hitchhiked her way back to me. What if her ghost sits with her back to mine, waiting for me to need her. I know she sleeps, because I bloomed in this body in her absence, seeping in through the thin skin of stretch marks, repainting the walls and filling the shelves with my books. I know she wakes, because when I need words to flow from my fingers, she pulls the long forgotten puppet strings taut. I wonder if the Writer will ever live in this body again. Maybe if I'll sleep through one of her midnight visits, and she'll slit my throat and take it back. Could be that we could cohabitate someday. What if she gets tired of me and disappears for good.

I ruined a friendship and regretted it one time and now I will harbor this crush forever and ever