Where did the anchor go?

You said, "It's my turn to have a family." In that instant, I craved starting over. Can we?

It hurts It hurts It hurts It hurts It hurts.

Watching my whole life erupt Out of body, on the ceiling, Raining confetti in visceral colors While you broke the news I wasn't enough.

You crossed the ocean to stay. I turned off my phone, And my mind, And my heart, And I was nothing, And no one, And I would never Be corporeal again.

A sacred piano shattering under sore fists, Every discarded key engraved with "I'm sorry," And "I love you," And "Please don't leave me like this."

I gathered up every memory:

Sitting on your shoulders Plucking tree-stars from the maples. Feeding box bugs to terrarium frogs. Cooking homemade fried chicken To Howard Jones music videos, And five movies For five days For five dollars.

I wove them with tear-soaked tissues. Cloaked in handmade hatred, I sustained rage with half-bent truths Just so I didn't have to miss you.

But every day I looked in the mirror, And saw your eyes  On my face, And I Couldn't Cope.

When overdose grew mundane And the void inside my chest Reached every extremity, I prepared to dissect four years of pain.

She noticed his mannerisms and the way he carried himself were always so effortlessly graceful. It was like he was gliding through the world while everyone else meandered around him as if their joints needed oiling.

He noticed that she seemed old for her age in the way that she spoke and thought, a cynic's mind with the heart of a philosopher, solving the world's problems with ballpoint pens on takeout napkins because to her, the fix was easy and obvious.

Immediately and without any fathomable explanation, she was the only one who ever made him feel safe, and he was the only one who ever made her feel like she belonged somewhere.

He radiates sunshine and warmth, and being around him feels  like your first breath of fresh air after breaking away from a pit crowd at a summer concert.

She is the first few drops of rain on your bare skin, and talking to her feels like the comfort of the sound of tea-stained pages turning while you write secrets in your leather bound journal.

Together, they are a hurricane made of burning stars, and when the passion dies down, the little diamonds that cut through the winds are catapulted into the sky to rest over everything like the roof of a blanket fort in the living room at 3am, and the world goes quiet around them.

Even though they both know she is just pretending when she points out Orion's Belt or Achilles in the lights above them, he still asks her to tell him the stories of every constellation because one night of finding shapes in plastic LED bulbs against a satin sheet held up by chairs in a world they made up together is better than a thousand years in the Garden of Eden.

Her voice is the soundtrack to his morning routine, and his smile is that sliver of moonlight that keeps her company when she stirs awake in the middle of the night.

I wanna cook someone breakfast before they're up in the morning, let the smell of savory bacon and cinnamon coffee dictate the trailing off of their dreams as their consciousness bleeds into the here and now, fueling a lazy, sleepy smile because they know the dream continues just a few paces up the hall.

I wanna watch their eyes light up when I ask them how their day was after a long shift at work, helping them take their boots off, knuckling knots out of their shoulders while all the little details of their daily dissatisfactions dissipate like a long slow exhale in winter air.