Learning Myself, Learning You, Learning Alone

And every sound feels sharp with hurry,

I close my eyes,

And then I hear her voice.

It comes like rain on warm pavement,

Soft enough to calm the dust of thought,

Steady as the tide

That knows the shore by heart.

In that sound,

The world loosens its grip.

Knots I didn’t know I carried

Unravel without a word.

Her voice is a window,

Opened in a dim room,

Suddenly there is air,

Suddenly there is light,

Suddenly I remember how to breathe.

It carries laughter like wind carries petals,

Gentle, unafraid of silence,

Beautiful in the spaces between syllables,

Where meaning rests.

And everything becomes smaller,

The worries,

The noise,

The weight of hours.

Until all that remains

Is the quiet miracle

Of hearing her speak,

And feeling the world

I don't want you to ever say,

"I wish heaven had a phone".

Cause I have a phone right now,

Back to every thought of you,

Every ounce of me that desires you,

Like a bird that desires flight.

Every thought of you,

Fills my soul back to what I remember it being,

Every replayed sonnet of your voice,

Quiets the voices within me.

Not to a murmur, no.

You and all of your entirety,

Make them disappear,

Completely.

Only when you leave my mind,

Do they have the strength to return.

So when we go days with silence,

They get louder.

I want you back,

Not just to quiet them,

Because I am empty without you,

I am nothing, without you.

So if we never come back to each other,

Then I will die,

Not happily,

Numb,

arms too long, or the shoulders pinch.

Every room feels rented,

every welcome signed in pencil.

I know the language of almost,

almost home, almost known,

almost someone’s “stay as long as you like,”

said with a glance at the clock.

Maps tell me where things are,

not where they mean something.

I’ve stood in crowds that felt empty

and empty fields that asked nothing of me.

Sometimes I think belonging is a sound,

a name spoken without explanation,

a silence that doesn’t rush to fill itself,

a door that opens without asking why.

Until then, I carry myself like luggage,

careful, scuffed, still moving.

If I don’t know where I belong yet,

maybe it’s because I’m still becoming

but the question feels like begging.

Not on my knees,

worse,

in my head, rehearsing humility

until it sounds like virtue.

Every silence you leave behind

becomes a courtroom,

where I prosecute myself

with evidence I planted.

Look how small I am, I say.

Look how reasonable my suffering is.

I call it self-hatred

because it sounds honest,

because it sounds earned.

But underneath, it’s softer than that,

a kind of self-pity

that wants to be held,

that wants you to notice the bruise

even if I pressed it there myself.

I don’t know where I stand with you,

and that not-knowing,

feels like a verdict.

So I fill in the blanks with blame,

tell myself I deserve the distance,

that loving me is a favor

no one owes.

Still, I wish you’d say something,

anything,

that would interrupt the story

I keep telling myself

about being unlovable,

in such a patient, articulate way.

Because maybe the hardest part,

isn’t that you haven’t chosen me,

it’s that I keep choosing

to stand on my own throat,

or just the quiet I left behind,

the way a room cools after a candle’s gone,

still warm, but no longer alive?

Do you care for me,

or for the habit of my name,

resting on your tongue,

familiar as a song you don’t listen to anymore?

I wonder if absence ever startles you,

if my silence knocks at odd hours,

or if you’ve learned to live,

without checking the door.

I miss you in verbs,

in things unfinished,

in questions that ache,

because they never learned how to end.

But tell me,

when you think of me,

is it a wound,

when nothing asks for my attention

and everything reminds me of her.

Her name lingers in my chest,

unspoken but heavy,

like a song I never finished.

Some nights I swear she’s almost here,

in the space beside me,

in the breath before sleep,

in the hope I pretend not to have.

I carry her absence gently,

because missing her

is the last way

Morning light on the wall,

The way coffee forgives me,

Songs that know my childhood,

better than I do.

I’d list faces next,

the ones that feel like home,

even when we don’t speak,

Laughter that arrives unannounced,

Hands that stayed.

Then places,

A street I never learned the name of,

but still miss,

Rooms that remember me,

more kindly than I remember myself.

I’d keep going,

Books with cracked spines,

Silence that doesn’t ask questions,

The exact moment before rain.

The list would grow long,

curling at the edges,

crowded with love I didn’t realize,

I was carrying so carefully.

And only at the end,

after the ink thinned,

after my wrist ached,

would I pause, surprised,

by the empty space left.

As if I had forgotten,

I was allowed to be included,

As if loving the world,

were easier than circling my own name,

and admitting,