ku-o;

I last saw him when we went to San Francisco. After telling myself that I would never get into a long-distance relationship, I did. We hadn’t seen each other for three months and decided to meet up in San Francisco out of convenience: his mother lived out there and he was visiting her for the holidays.

“I can’t do this,” I said.

“What’s going on?”

After giving him early-morning head, I got dressed, walked out to the front of the hotel, and called my friend Iris.

“I haven’t felt insecure in years.” There was a silence on the phone. Well, Iris let out a sigh that dissolved into the silence. “We haven’t kissed once since we’ve been out here.”

An older white man walked by me, staring at my inevitably conspicuous nipples poking through my top.

I turned my back to the man and folded my arm across my chest. “It’s so cold here,” I said. San Francisco was a strange city to me. There was an inexplicable heaviness looming at every street corner, and the people pulled it with them as they scurried, strangely, leisurely, through the streets.

“I don’t like it out here,” I said, my voice was hushed. For some reason, I was worried someone was going to hear my confession and tell me to leave. Get out and don’t come back; there’s plenty of people who would feel overjoyed to be fifteen minutes from Fisherman’s Wharf. “I’m gonna go,” I said, interjecting my self, “I think he wants to walk around the city today.”

“You know what you have to do, right,” Iris said.

It is pink. It is a field of unplucked flowers and your floating petals. You taste like what I’ve been looking for, and I do not know if I can leave us now.

When you ask me if I love her, I drink the watermelon. It spills from my mouth, and is dripping down my neck now. You place your hand on my collarbone; catch the drop in the palm of your hand. With your sticky, sweet, cinnamon fingers. You run yourself through my head.

My hair is painted in red. Your fingers are burning and I am a mess. My lips are stuck together and I am a mess. Because of you. And I am a mess.

Somewhere in my back, between my vertebrae and shoulder blades. In my breath -- where I hold you the most. Always inhaling.

Inhaling your scents then uncontrollably exhaling my sense. This is when you drive me crazy. This is when I break my hands. This is when I lose my backbone, soften into impotence; soften into innocence. Soften into you, in a sense.

I hold you anyway I can. And sometimes I hold you so high, you dissolve into the firmament, turn into the Could’ve-Been angel, and I am left alone.