Thoughts Of It

The way you hair feels on my neck when you hold me,

During winter, early sunset -

Sunday afternoon, laying in an ocean of fabric.

“I love you”s until the sun leaves

our sky

without us noticing the dark

enveloping the room.

Time

Does not exist.

Your arm around me,

My feet between your feet.

Heart palpitations

Lightheaded wondering what will come of you.

You are not 16 - kissing in cars, hazy windows.

You are not 19 - Sneaking in the back yard to fight or feel each other.

You are not 23 - hidden versions of me tucked in fantasy lyrics of songs that no one else will ever know were written.

You are not uncertain hope waiting to become something.

You are quiet peace.

You are hours of silent hand holding and

more comfortable than my favorite pillow, pulling me closer in bed because your dreams missed me,

You are simply knowing.

constellations on my legs

I am a breathing galaxy

I am out

I used to be afraid of how he would remind me of you.

In so many ways,

In subtle ways

I realize that I’ve started to forget you.

A few months ago It occurred to me that I didn’t remember certain details of stories that I used to know by heart.

Last week I couldn’t remember where you went to high school.

This morning I had your middle name on the tip of my tongue, but it would not catch up to the thought of you

And I breathed it off.

Details of a story that used to electrocute emotions through my body like lightning,

After so much time,

Feel like parts of history that I only learned about in books, now.

Years ago I thought that time was my enemy, moving so slowly against my favor

And now

Time is the greatest gift I have ever been given.

He means the right things, but feels as far away as you were.

so many words for men

who did not speak

my language.

Everything I say, an SOS signal manifesting above

the wall of insecurities I’ve built between myself and the world outside

of me, but still desperate for shelter from the sun by noon.

Maybe I’ll end up like my sister;

a mirror, and my own body will look more like enemies to me than an angry

man, who spells out “I love you” with bloody holes I’ve hidden under

pictures on my walls. Maybe I’ll settle for broken drywall over broken bones,

and maybe I’ll decide that walking on eggshells around his temper is easier

than being alone with no man, a mirror and my own body.

Maybe I have been destined to fall in a line that keeps my hands tied behind

my back, so that I cannot see what they are doing, until it’s too late.

But I wonder, if maybe that means that for the very first time I choose not to believe

in destiny.”

I drowned in us,

I used to love you.

I loved the way you felt

in my hands and the way you

craved my morning breath more than your morning cigarette

that you told me

you didn’t need.

and it occurs to me

that just because you aren’t my home anymore

doesn’t mean

I didnt leave a few pillows

and eyelashes

behind.

I was well aquainted

with your mattress

and she

had a hard time letting me go,

too.

I’ve convinced myself that I could not have possibly,

actually,

ever loved you

because love was not supposed to feel the way

you felt

for most of the ride.

It was my first time on that coaster

and I

was freefalling.

so forgive me,

for forgetting to remember the view

from the top.

I know, now

that you would not have been something

I was forced

to survive losing

if you were not something

that kept me breathing,

once, too.

you were the air in my lungs, boy.

I was your body of water.

You suffocated in me

and I drowned in us.

but before I did,

I used to love you.

I wrote poems for you, too.

They rhymed the way that most of my words refuse to and

they were a torn, creased, failed origami attempt in a

wasteland

where our love notes escaped to on weekends.

They could breathe, there.

You couldn’t find them,

they were all written

in my handwriting and I dare you to tell me that you even remember

what my I’s look like.

I got tired of rhyming your name with watermarks so I wrote myself a oneway ticket on a paper airplane

headed for the door.

Pedestals cracked under 15 year-old memories of summertime flowers in the yard,

and you could have just told her that his flavor was happiness

because a girl’s first words are never “knowledge is power”

She is afraid of heights,

and she does not know that power would have required a much shorter ladder.

“He’ll taste like ecstasy”;

You ride that stigmatic high all the way to the chapel and watch your dreams come true, girl.

Don’t you ever come down.

you were put here to love, baby

and he was put here to recieve that love

because love is not selfish and where better for yours to be assigned a seat than in a man’s clumsy hands?

He tasted alright.

He tasted like

honeysuckles

and flights

above the moon,

but he never

tasted like sugar.

I had a sweet tooth

that I followed

to the tip of my own tongue.