el.

1 So, it’s morning. Or maybe afternoon. There’s light pouring through the window and it’s got you looking the kind of haloed and soft you only see in movies. I’m only half awake but I’m already writing poetry about your eyelashes, can you believe that?   2 In the mirror, I pretend to watch myself watching myself brushing my teeth. Instead, I watch you run your hands through your hair: again and again and again and again. More than once, I’ve seen the way you try to rearrange your body into negative space. Like one of those optical illusions— the vase with the two faces. You forgot you could be both of them. You forgot that when you lean too close to a work of art the whole picture blurs and disappears.   3 A new painting: one with no negative space. You as steady hands and solid ground. You with a ukulele and a dog. Coffee and cayenne. Cheap wine and expensive whiskey. All that blue in your closet. You as the perfect first date and something soft to come home to. Bad jokes and good intentions and all that— light.   4 Yes, light. Listen, so, it’s late. Or the time of night some people call morning. It’s dark in the car, but you laugh— I mean, really laugh. The kind that catches you by surprise and crinkles up the corners of your eyes—and it’s like a camera flash in a windowless room. It’s the best thing I’ve seen, all day.   5 Every morning, the sun has to relearn how to outshine you. Sometimes even she is not bright enough.

self care is also being honest with yourself about your negative habits and mistakes. it’s also taking ownership of your faults and growing from them. self care is diverting from a negative space to a positive one. creating light and balance. blooming. watering your own flowers. being gentle but honest with yourself.

I tell myself,  that you are only a moment. How in this universe full of moments,  we’re just two stars that found the same orbit. I tell myself that  it doesn’t matter. if we fall out of love, fall out of orbit, stop chasing our heels,  stop touching each other, like sunflowers  are growing from  our skins. I tell myself that you are not the sun and I am not the greedy Earth. A mantra or a prayer, I tell myself, that it doesn’t matter if someday,  I cannot hold  the soft mass of you in my arms.  That I will  love you properly here and now.  What I mean is,  if we are a moment,  I want us to track through forever with our dirty shoes, and our suitcases. If we are a moment, let it be  now and now and now.

“Forgive me my grief that spans out acres. I have love the size of a church, & no one to give it to. Do I cut my hair? Do I harvest all of my beginnings? I touch my teeth with my tongue to remember the sharp can fade. Someone learns my name. I fall asleep.

Like a snake, my heart has shed its skin. I hold it here in my hand, full of honey and wounds.

You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.

I want to tell you I miss you with no subtext. No guilt, no anger, no expectation that you’ll fix it. I don’t want you to feel bad or to tell me it will get better. This is where we are meant to be right now – me apart from you, my hands a little empty and my heart a little sad. I just miss you. I wanted you to know.

I miss you, but I don’t wish you were here.

We happened. Like a fucking circus blowing through town, we happened, left wrappers and pinwheels littering the ground like dead bodies. Like the end of a war. You moved around the house so gracefully, never touching me, and I laughed because I thought it was your best act, waited hours for your hands because I didn’t want to miss the rest of the show. We walked past each other like a trapeze act, like acrobats on a tightrope, arms spread on either side like it would save them from falling, and we were the best act around. The tent opened, and we were beautiful, effortless, jumping through rings of fire, catching each other in mid-air, wearing our best clothes. You loved me so well with the doors open. You loved me so well with an audience, but I don’t want the circus anymore. I don’t want it. I want to bury it six feet under, mourn it like a casualty and then move on. Chalk it up to something that sounds less like an empty fairground where we fired our first shots, where we first started to fracture like a bone. We may not have worked, but, my God, were we good at pretending. My God, were we something to look at.

My body writes into your flesh the poem you make of me. Touching you I catch midnight as moon fires set in my throat.