#aprilfoolreblogs

all that is left of you is tethered to a tremor.

your absence widens, and keeps on widening until we are finally separate.

the gulf between us is a star-fed river.

the gulf between us is a light-starved chasm.

I watch you convulse, collapse into yourself.

you, a soft nebulous shadow that grows warm and bright, incandescent, from a seed.

so quiet. so very quiet.

you spin away in the vacuum of space. pulse light. scintillate morse code answers.

i hear the silence.

i hear everything you want to say.

june opens its mouth into a circle, and wet moon dreams pour, bury, syllable-long love.

fish, cre- -scen- t, bone, shell— this soft, organic memory of you.

this grief-sediment that ages, compresses, into fossil

over time

becomes poems on picture-stone.

now this return of a ghost from the shadows, moth-soft.

its breath visibly pleated inside a small unspeaking mouth.

its beaded eyes, condensed obsidian spheres, moonflower intense.

i befriend darkness by its wings that are half sheen half lace. and measure space by its wingspan to travel light years into the past. when you and I were aflutter against blinding love.

i tell you "i am lost without you."

"love doesn't need a memory" you whisper.

"i wish …" i begin to say

but every memory dissolves into diffused light.

the sea is endless beyond our dreaming.

on my forehead, on my palms, lines of destiny pulsate fluid as waves. signals call and trace your undulation.

you slip, iridescent nebulous, through seascape. a soft grey-green shadow.

a tiny blip on the map I keep hidden in my heart.

i know how to find you.

it’s broken now. and i release any part of you that was ever bound to me. i showed you what i thought was every part of me. i think that’s why it felt like there was a death. but it wasn’t you or even us who died; it was me. i was dying. you saw and felt how pure my love was for you and you, like the thief you are, decided it was yours to take. greedily feasting on me, while i was in awe of you. the movies i had watched as a teen learning what love was. you watched those with me, but you don’t own them. i own them. they shaped me. you will never be able to take it from me. i may take some time to disassociate from the memory of sharing them with you, but it will come back to me. the songs i sang in front of you in the shower and the music that we shared and the lines between them where i live sometimes; they still belong to me. those songs will slowly fade of memories with you and belong to me again. the poems and love-notes i wrote you will never be recycled and used on other people like you did to me, or to them, or to the girl you’re currently extorting. they die with me. i am in the marrow of my bones, not you. i don’t know where the “i love you’s” go after they die, but they always seem to grow back and my field of sunflowers will raise their heads to Soleil again. i’ll write new poems and love-me’s and love-me-not’s for myself and about myself and for someone who can truly hold them. i won’t have to fight for it or cry for it or beg for it or lose myself for it, it will be given freely. and i’ll grow to appreciate the parts of myself that you and others deemed unfit. the thing is, i was never unequal. i am enough to sit at the table and want that for myself. they won’t hesitate and they’ll follow through on their promises. the names i told you about that i’ve held dear for almost a decade, they’re still mine. you won’t tarnish their meaning or the want and hope i have of being a mama one day. i had lived in the knowledge for years that i wasn’t deserving and that “someone like me doesn’t get to have those things”. maybe i will one day, then again maybe i won’t. i know someone will truly want that with me and empower me rather than watch the despair i feel of each passing month rolling into a year of unkept promises and snuffed lives. i know of the sadness that took a toll on my body and weight i gained from disordered eating. binging to keep myself small for you. when i met you i was barely human. i still question who i am now and how hell really does have a basement. but i’ll lose the weight of you and the sadness i gained. i’ll look like me again. feel like me again. sing like me again. laugh like me again. i’ll sleep with my conscience and you’ll hold your lies tighter. and soon you’ll be so far from my mind not even the punchlines can find you. a forgotten joke someone wrote on the lip of napkin used to wipe a spill. and me? i’ll be doing some hot girl shit like twirling my hair in my fingers probably having my pussy devoured by someone who can make me cum and keep me safe.

that is my sense of self. i am more than two-knuckles deep. you should mourn the loss of me. you had me for more than a year and you only dipped your toes; i am an ocean.