i have so much of you in my heart

slip into me, drunk, off love or the soju you brought tonight. its nighttime and i miss you like moss growing on tree trunks

what time is it inside you? where i want to hide, fold me into an origami dove, place me on the tip of your heart.

your silence is a trench i swim in, in my summer bikini. you swallow me

i haven't ate since that night in march, in may i fell onto the floor of the bar, trying to pass my intoxication off as an excuse to see you.

beautiful boy. there is not a mountain i wouldn't climb for you or an ocean i wouldn't cross.

sometimes at night i try to count the miles between us, and give them all a name. i would swallow all of the asphalt on interstate 10 from here to California if it meant being closer to you.

i love you deeply from my womb, where i feel jealous of your mother where you resided first. i want to pick strawberries with you and feed them to you in some alternate timeline where we get 50 years instead of a swollen summer. i want to crack open for you like a fruit.

and half in love with you, i drive home. tears cloud my vision on the freeway. suddenly i smile without meaning to, when the thought of your face in the hollows of my palms passes through my mind like a gust of wind.

your silhouette on the first night we met has been branded into the backs of my eyelids like some wild animal torture technique. i remember the soft of the inside of your hands. i remember, too, the crying afterward until my full body trembled. i remember the analog clock in your studio, three ten am. how i was so swollen with love for you.

i checked myself into an outpatient facility a few weeks later. you were bubblegum that got tangled in the hair follicles of my brain and i needed a surgeon to pick you out, meticulous. that didn't help. i learned that some lessons you learn in the dark, in your room, alone.

i used to want anything at all from him, a smile, a hug, a tender kiss. as we had sex for some reason i thought of cyrus, and how i think in my own way i'd loved cyrus too. or i loved the idea of cyrus. and i had loved the idea of juan, who i knew much more and spent more time with. but i didn't love him anymore, and i felt the absence of that love so starkly. it felt like two strangers making love.

there will always be a part of me that's hungry for him. but that part of me has grown so small, even when i got what it hungered for, it fell short of making me happy. it felt like making love to someone i didn't know, being in a room i'd never be in again, with a person who's memory would fade quickly.

it's nice to think of him, and the memories we shared together. it's also nice to know i wasn't forgotten and thrown away. i was still very much alive in him and i found comfort in that. but the me he loved is gone, she doesn't exist anymore. it felt like he wasn't making love to me, but to his memory. and i was doing the same.

i feel confident that this will pass like everything else and it, too, will be something i look back on fondly. to know that we will always have a shred of tenderness for each other soothes some broken part of me. i know i won't grow old with him and i won't know who he ends up with, who he'll become in his later years. but I'll be in his heart forever, and his memory will come along with me as i grow old and eventually pass, I'm sure when I'm 85 I'll remember how soft his skin used to be when he was 24.

i wish so badly that things had worked out the way i hoped for them when i was 24. i loved him with a ferocity that overtook me at times, that i can't explain to anyone with words. i loved him the only way you can love the first time, blindly and with endless devotion. i want to mourn the death of that 24 year old woman who needed him so badly, who found so much comfort in his arms and in his words and in his eyes. i felt him search for her and i was immediately aware of her absence, how long it had been since she'd lived in this body of mine. i looked for her too and i called out to her, and she didn't answer. it's like he looked into my heart and he saw a cavern where there used to be a girl who loved him.

i still remember your smile, the first one. i remember the last one too, half hearted and falling down like stairs

i wrote this poem because i've found myself crying tonight, and in reading it back a few times, my need to play out self sacrifice in search of having my love reciprocated is clear. i wonder why i think self punishment is somehow more righteous than a love you don't have to beg for is, and i think its clear to me how i have a pattern of putting myself in this victim role--but to what end? i think that, i believe if i suffer enough, suffer more and suffer more, then i will finally be deserving of the love i want so bad. that i don't deserve love if it doesn't make me suffer, and if someone isn't punishing me enough I'll create conflict so i can play out the part that hurts. maybe i think there is righteousness in suffering, and i self sabotage and purposely pick people who can't repair, don't care, or are irresponsible with my heart so i can prolong my suffering because my identity is "the sufferer." i literally dehumanize myself and identify as an open wound.

i remember the way our bodies twisted and writhed in pleasure, and how i wanted to open wide, wider for you, become a convex cave, become a negative image where you could stuff yourself and hide yourself inside.

i became a gaping mouth, turned lockjaw waiting for your call, your dm, your text, your smoke signal, the bat of your eyelash

slowly my mouth widened every day waiting for you to slither in, have i opened myself wide enough yet? can he see the black hole in me i shrunk myself down to to make room for him?

i became so wide i reached my own ends from the other side and became nothing but a cavernous circle inside your getaway footsteps echoed like a late night assault in a dimly lit alleyway.

my eyeballs peer into the deep well of myself, the ether i tore my own cells apart to keep warm for your body, and i can't find you. I've given you the greatest, most holy gift my body of Christ and in between my tremors i hear your laugh, a dog's snarl on the other side of the continent.

its tuesday. it's tuesday night and nothing is wrong but i have singlehandedly and painstakingly performed a samurai's honorable self suicide while you down a bud light in a different city.

can't you hear the dove's cry? don't you know that the morning after a bloody battle, with limbs and entrails splayed across the landscape like oil paint, the bird still sings?

i unraveled for you. my stomach turned inside out for you. i crawled out of my own flesh and offered you my holy body, and i got your voicemail.

an arm hanging out of a moving cars open window at 6 am. i would have eaten the pavement in between us.

you shoved your name down my throat with spidery fingers. a seed. i loved the way you said my name. i loved the way your breath synced with mine.

i woke up before you that morning and i watched you sleep, i wanted so badly to take you in my arms and hold you then. i knew how tired you were, how exhausted, how this world had worn you down. i wanted to show you, that morning and forever, how it would feel to be loved by me. i watched your face, and i saw how innocent you were despite it all. the lies and the fights and the machismo, and you were such a tender thing, chest moving up and down with each breath.

i will never be seen by you. i will never be a girl with a soul, just a body with open legs and a forgiving smile. how i would still take you in my arms, even tonight, and hold you until we both turned to ash.

i'm like a sick dog, searching for your scent on any draft that passes.

does the moon know you better than me now? has she seen your skin recently, has she caressed your cheek.

i want another day, another hour, another painful second. my blood has turned to gasoline. my heart into a radiator in an old ford that doesn't run anymore. i need you.

another man kissed me the same way i kissed you when i knew i loved you. i broke my heart in half trying to decipher it, trying to find you somehow in his kisses.

if you walk into a room full of people and think of whoever isn't there, aren't they still there somehow? you've been in every room I've walked into since you left.

i would gut myself for you, i would chisel my nails down until they were dull enough to be excruciating when i ripped myself open for you. and i have done it, my love ritual.

there are so many ways to tell you how I've missed you. a car alarm in the middle of the night. a howling dog. a spoiled egg.

even with her there i can feel a fire inside, ticking like a clock. counting down, or maybe counting away. i miss the sweat from your brow falling into my open mouth, i miss the way you kissed my hand that last time you left, tender like a thunderstorm.

peel my skin and bones away and there'd be atoms left over from when the universe formed us from the same bone off adam's rib. take me back to the night you stared at me from across the bar, or the night you tucked me in and i said in a child's voice that will all I'll ever have, i love you.

you're just a memory now, a story. a phantom, an outline of a man passing by me in the street. how young we were. to be that single tear on your brown cheek when you said you'll always remember me.