oh no, you make me feel human.

hopeful but unexpectant

i mean you no harm

that may or may not be made

to accept this

to the soft wonder of humanity, to mattering

i miss it

isn't far enough

tried to write a poem but all that came out was your name

you turned in bed, fitful, chasing sleep between rib-wracking coughs, you or me, didn't matter, it woke us both. i fancied myself a poet, so i created a world for us, in between sleep and four AM, where the arm you curved over my soft, first-touched body meant something, anything, and the almost-words left behind my ear, small gifts, were not just words but something, anything-- it was like i was begging you to matter, and i never want to plead for my own existence again.

i play yahtzee with people who love me. i try to think of other things-- not what you might think of my new fringe, or how i'm wearing new shoes, stupid shit like that, or how it's raining, right now, california, early may, and how softly it rained the night i came back to aberdeen, how softly you kissed me then.

tonight while getting in my car, when you were asleep thousands of miles away, my knee nudged the edge of the steering wheel, hitting the scar from the night i fell on the aberdeen asphalt and bled all the way down george street to union square where you were getting off work and i sat at the coffee shop all the christmas lights around me and thought about how badly i loved you, as i looked at my shattered phone screen and bloody knee, and later that night i would tell you i loved you and you would break my heart all over again because you love me but not like that, because you love me but not enough, and i just think it's odd how it's been nearly six months now and my knee nudged the edge of my steering wheel just so, and i was there on the night i picked gravel out of my skin, the night i ate chinese food as we sat by the statue just off bridge street, the night you couldn't love me enough, and it still, still hurts

you're thinking about bravery. you're thinking of a tree with the moon caught on every branch, something you never thought could happen: the act of loving again after such cruel gifts were given and then all at once taken away. you choose it, again and again, despite the odds, and this, this is bravery.

the moon's gone out, extinguished, leaving wisps of cloud, smoke, the entrails of being my body wakes itself to the moonlight before its unexpected end, refuses to rest, mind spinning slowly, sick with its own inertia

i catalogue the words and phrases unsure of which you will mean in the next few hours. i save your goodnight's. they are soft, kind, as if offered to make amends for the love you couldn't manage to give me.