one year of falling out of love
January: The year has turned the corner and we are still in love. Your eyes still enough to undress me like a shiver, and we spend hours in the shower just holding one another. One night, while drunk for the first time, a child’s shampoo bottle fills me with hysterics and I have never loved someone more.
February: Something between us has begun to scab, but I trust you, sometimes against my better judgment. In your words, you “think about me all the time.” A woman down the block becomes a widow and the word fascinates me for days. Not quite a window.
March: We run through the woods and immerse ourselves in lakes; I still marvel at your smell the morning you’ve left my bed. My feelings burst like blood vessels, our bodies together pulse like aneurysms.
April: Rain, straight heavy for a month. Something prickles the hair on the back of my neck, familiar like a childhood friend. I swallow cherry pits and hope to grow into something better than this.
May: There are no flowers this month. You still love me, but it’s distant.
June: Something happened, but naming it brings it to life. I bury it instead.
July: The groundskeeper helps me plant black-eyed susans, furrow each bulb into the ground like an anvil. Four lines of blood red tulips snake across the grass outside the psychology building.
August: Seven nights spent with fists balled against mouth, sobs climbing through like a brook. You say I can do anything I want with what happened; I am welcome to tell anyone. One night, you call me drunk and staggering, bike down by the river, regret a chokechain in the pit of your stomach.
September: I stop picturing our house, the dog, a baby, our picket fence. I don’t know what I want, but I know it’s not this.
October: You stop picturing them too.
November: It is the coldest winter on record. We no longer talk. I would still know your voice anywhere, just not everywhere.
December: It’s been a year since the first time you were inside me. And so it ends as it began, first in pleasure, then in pain.
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