words i left behind

That first kiss jolted me out of the strange haze I had been living in, made me forget what it was to cry on a bathroom floor. All I knew was that I wanted more of your lips, your incredible softness. You kissed like dawn, all hope and color. Everyone deserves to feel that at least once, to know the world is capable of breaking your heart but also slowly mending it. I had never been kissed quite like that before.

the year of letting go, of retreating. of hearing 'no' over and over, and telling myself 'yes' anyway. the year love left and timidly crept back in. i stopped writing because you gave me a hundred reasons to stop bleeding. the year 'good-bye' also meant 'i love you.' i started writing because breaking is not a sign of weakness. the year i reminded myself my mother doesn’t have all the answers anymore, and neither do you. i learned gratitude and that has been enough. the year i marveled at trees. i wonder if leaves ask forgiveness for leaving, when love settles softly without permission. the year i looked at my body and recognized home.

Someone recently asked me, 'What are you pretending not to know today?' I realized I have been hiding from myself lately. How, as a writer, I have been neglecting all the things I don’t want to acknowledge. I’ve kept dark the things that are easiest to keep there. Like this: My mother inspires and terrifies me. I want to be like her, but I don’t want to be her. I want her courage but not her anger. I want her tenacity but not her prejudices. I want her strength but not her inability to let go. I am scared that my children will hate the parts of me that have molded themselves in her name. Like this: I miss you. I love you. Your absence is heavy every day. Like this: Living alone is just an excuse to eat what I want and cry when I want. My pillow doesn’t judge me for falling asleep at 1 am with my glasses on. Like this: My birthday is next month. I’m not excited to celebrate it because I don’t know if you will call me. Like this: I still want to name her Charlotte with you.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I need to be touched. I just want to remember what skin worshipping skin feels like, hands seeking more altars on my body to pray to. You used to be here to do this, but not anymore. Now it’s always a countdown until the miles close, and I pull your scent from next to me instead of from memory. Baby, I’m sorry for being weak. I'm sorry I'm tempted by touch. I'm sorry I'm looking for it in places that aren't you.

I hold our memories so closely not because I still love you but because the depth of our relationship surprises me even now. I put a battering ram to my own walls for you. And normally, I hate everything about walls in poetry, but here, I was both the fortress and the surrender. There were no remains left to scatter. Instead of raking new earth over raw ground, you ran. And this, perhaps, is what keeps me up: you left me open and wanting. You didn't ask for this, you say. I didn't want this either, I whisper.

It is impossible for me to ignore you. Your kindness is arresting in itself but your authenticity holds a stadium captive. I wonder how we found each other in this jarring mess of a world. You tell me that our skin doesn’t have to sing from the same key to understand each other’s language. Baby, love and I live on separate planets but here, in our whirlwind, you remind me that man landed on the moon and danced with Orion. You changed the game.

I thought I was getting through to you. You let me believe it when you told me that I was chipping away at those years you lived inside yourself. You let yourself believe it too. And you think it is strange that I still have so much to say to you, that I won't bury us. But I'm here to finish what I started: I'll keep chipping until you see the person you are, the gentle eyes that held me and the selfish hands that only recognized her. They are all you. This was all you.

We’re falling and tumbling and crashing down a cliffside that neither of us has any intention of climbing back up. We’re catching on debris and lovers and weaknesses that have ruined us before but this time, we swear it’ll be different. At the bottom, we look up with bloody hands, silence pooling at our feet. This dry earth smells familiar. I know you never intended for us both to end up here. Tell me, was gravity any kinder this time?

I think I have been away from writing for too long. I think poetry is punishing me for my absence. This must be why your scent lingers; I haven't written you out of my body yet. So then, it falls to me to remind myself why I left. Why, in the middle of winter, we were the one thing burning up, letting embers catch on arms stiff with desperation. How I crawled back to you when you never asked me to. How you made way for him to be my spring and summer, a steady beat overriding your staccato promises. I'll keep writing whatever it takes for my ribs to hold my own name, and no one else's.

Something about you still haunts me, and I would give nearly anything to shake you. It has been almost a year since we met. Somewhere, better versions of ourselves made it. They are a kingdom tender with honesty. I wouldn't recognize us in them. It seems we were only built to unlearn touch. Even now, I hold my breath rounding every corner, in case you are around the next one. How do you still lie heavy in these bones? This is what I write for you at 1 in the morning. Maybe dawn will look different. Maybe another year around the sun will look different.

I think I miss writing, but I don't miss the way I used to shake for hours after I dissected your good-byes. I don't miss the way you spoke in cracks and disaster and mending. You made it easier for me to spill open but you were never around to clean up after. I think I miss writing but I don't need you here anymore to remind me what it is to feel. He keeps me quiet company but loves me loudly. I could miss writing for this.

How can I ever again mistake a Friday the 13th as being unlucky when our first date fell on one? Since then, every superstition has been laughable, every crack in the pavement another opportunity to twist my body closer to yours so we can defiantly step on it together. You love me back to fullness and all my metaphors for loss and breaking do not come so easily now. So maybe it was good luck, maybe it was a coincidence, but the moon must have found another home because you have turned the tide in this mess of a heart.

Sometimes, desire alone is not enough to hold two people together. You think there will always be reason to turn love away. Yes, maybe there is never a perfect time to brave an ocean when your lungs feel small enough to be a child's plaything, but there is bad timing and then there is better timing. And right now, I cannot meet you in all the ways you deserve. I have been where you are too many times before, with a heart bigger than the sun and just as bright, and I know better. So I will do better. This is a gentle severing, a wish that, months from now, when I am no longer tethered to his memories and he feels like fiction, you will still want me. I will come back to you, forgiveness and flowers haloing my head, and pray that you will still want me.

Today is the last day of NaPoWriMo, and I have not finished the A Poem A Day challenge. Part of me is disappointed, and part of me is proud that I kept up with it for as long as I could. I hope you all don’t think I’ve forgotten about this blog! Both paid work and volunteer work took over, and it has been all I can do to simply change into my PJs when I get home every day. 

I never could get mad at you.   No, I take that back. I knew how to be mad, for small things like being perpetually late and big things like ignoring my calls. My problem was not knowing how to stay angry. You charmed me with those big eyes that flattened any protest, and a smile that unstrapped all my secrets from my chest. Every time you looked at me, I came undone. I should have known then that you were as much the bullet as you were the exit wound.   When I walked away, I started scavenging your horizon for all the pieces I had strewn there. I wanted them to make friends with my trembling shoreline again. I didn't quite make it that far.   It turns out that, even in your absence, you unravel me.

I have a habit of moving cities when love has had its fill and taken flight. It used to be that even when he crossed my mind, I would have to take trains and planes and cars to press my body into his. I never did give in. Distance made it easy.  This is the first time we remain rooted in the same place, trace the same soil and hope our feet know better than to run into each other. It is so strange to wake up in the same city as you day after day. We see the same stars in the same alignment, and yet, my mornings feel so different without you in them. You are minutes away, and my muscle memory knows its way to your door. But I still can't hold you. Not when we ruined each other so grandly.  I hope you leave soon. I want to call this home again.