Yoko

I’ve never stopped remembering your skin – the way its smell infiltrated my bed sheets, the way it shivered tracing over my own, the way I gathered it up between my fingers like you were a dying commodity. Like loving you was the scarcest resource left on this earth.

I never stopped comparing people to you.

Every first date or first kiss or first morning waking up beside somebody else – each of them failed to be you. Everyone lacked your lopsided smile and your low-pitched laugh and the way your body curled around mine like the safest place on earth.

Every arm cradling my body wasn’t your arm. Every word whispered to me wasn’t whispered your voice. It was the world’s most illogical problem, with the world’s most unconventional solution.

Everything that wasn’t you was wrong. Everything that wasn’t you wasn’t worth it.

I’m not willing to love anyone else.

I’m not ready to re-tell my stories, not willing to map a new course. I still feel the heat rising from our bodies, at 4am, after the fights that kept us riling all night. I still remember you, hearttoheart breathtobreath chesttochest,

all of our honesties and agonies aligned. I still remember the ways we tore each other open. The rawness, the ugliness the ache that I don’t want to find in anybody else.

The worst in you, that only I encountered. The worst in me, that only you know.

I don’t really feel complete without you.

I’ve always felt a little dishonest, like parts of me stayed stuck inside of you.

I still feel as though our love was a house that we both lived in, for years and years and years. Until the carpets grew damaged from sunlight, our imprints left lodged inside the walls. I still feel a little out of place in each new residence, my body knowing, this is not home.

Knowing that nowhere has been a home without you. Knowing that our courses have been charted and our hearts have been vacated and I don’t know what else to do, but to show back up at the doorstep of that house we used to live in.

To turn the lock.

To gather you up inside my fingers like your skin is the world’s scarcest resource.

To breathe in every inch of you. Your ugly. Your aching. Your raw.

To come home, to stay home.

When I was a kid I loved puzzles. I used to put them together with my mom. And when I would get frustrated because I couldn’t get it right,  I would try and force the pieces into where I thought they should go.