“do you ever think of strangling me while i am asleep?”

he doesn’t.

but sometimes he watches my consciousness impersonate the softness of a preserved corpse and remembers the november sunset crowning : stillborn. i am the umbilical yarn winded around the last beautiful face he ever knew, the first gemini twin to dislodge itself from his corner of the constellations.

even our bodies wanted to write words and seem chronological but the only timeline we could build was eight p.m. kisses in a public bathroom and thirteen minutes of excruciating pain two years later in some small town in the south. he yawns and i smile because he is satisfied in being perfectly, horribly unsatisfied. he probably loves me.

yes, he does.

you are not the moon still in her infancy, stagnant and curled like a fetus. but you are the darkness she inherited, the definitions her blood will carry vein to vein, artery to bone, universe to useless. i often try to remind myself that last year it was summer. it was summer and the arches of your stature were not distorted like skyscrapers standing in a rainstorm. i remember the height of your temperature when my body was your fever.  lover, lover, lover - but you are not my lover. not anymore.

The gruesome softness in your voice, I can hear it again. I still see the vacancy between your words written on lined paper, stamped, received two weeks late. There is a sea, there is snow, there is soil, there is someone eight hundred miles away who said, “I am in love with you”, and sometimes I wonder if he meant it.

It was cold. It was cold and the sea was pitch black, blacker than the unconscious breath an existence takes under damp eyelids, curled palms, white memory, blush red hips unexposed by soft blankets. My fingers tried to be persuasive but you are not a noose, you are not the floor beneath my cracked ribs, you are not a color. You were always a postage stamp, checkered timeline, washed voice, summer freshness, blank stare, nothing, no one, smoke. I wanted to lose you to a girl’s bad dream in Kansas. I never wanted to lose you at all. I wanted to unbind you out of novels and snowy shoulders. Neither of us would remember, neither of us would remember what it felt like to feel each other’s unused space, in the bedroom, in the head. You forgot and so did I.

I think, I wish.

it was there again. the snow. underneath the heights of our veins and the stall in each breath you take when morning passes farther away from that bliss no one ever leaves bed with. in the color of your hands, in the lack of color of your hands, i remember how drunk you were one night, one year ago. i remember the sloppiness of the stars, the hours that disappeared into unconscious states. i could almost call it existence because there is nothing else that matches the word. nothing.

wolf,

we were never star crossed.

when i was with you and without you, i did not feel time or gravity or space. i didn’t hear the rain as much as i just knew its existence. i didn’t envy the moon or its authority. i didn’t remember the sea for its blues and greens and greys but for the parts of it that i didn’t get to see. and you were as stale as you were fresh. you were as dead as you were alive. our motion was slower than the carousel we became, maybe that is what made us impossible. because the universe moved so much faster. we were never star crossed.

just dimensionless.

to the boy with the two middle names,

sometimes i wonder how long it will take for us to get from the shore to the sea. i told you we would never be the ocean, we would never be as vast as the underwater universe and maybe never as clear as the november skies born inside of your arms. you are the receding coastline, darling, the washed away miles upon miles i can almost feel when i lose myself enough.

do you measure the distance between our stars? i don’t. but i measure the length of your fingers and the number of bumps on your spine and the inches of cold space in your bedroom on quiet sunday nights. the mornings of absence can be the worst, because waking up outside the dimension of our sunrise is a loneliness i won’t forget even when there is winter again and you are long gone.

yours,
the girl who remembers everything

bluejay,

he had so much snow in his eyes. i used to think that spending a night in his arms would feel like spending a night in the arctic. i thought i would wake up to glacial burn along the bridge of my nose and inside every chamber of my heart. but no, no, i didn’t fall in love with the thief. i didn’t fall in love with the sorcery, i didn’t fall in love with the dimensionless space echoed throughout our telephone calls.

and you, you were that first bite of sour citrus, the violets in the breakfast table vase, the skyline view of a place no one wants to leave, the smile i desperately need to remember, the photograph that always smells like fresh ink, the last conscious breath i take. i hope your side of the world is a precious gem, i hope the autumn leaves are crisp and the winter is as romantic as it should be.

p.s. (you are still all of those things to me.)

8:17pm

i never existed in the comatose of your sea town. i never existed in the rough folds of atlantic blue sleepily dressing shoreline by shoreline, and i will never exist as more than a color of sunset streamed in ribbons above the highway. but it’s none of these things that make me feel paper thin. maybe it’s the eggshell complexion of apartment walls, the creamy texture of soft, dull voices. or maybe it has just been so quiet that i can’t hear absolutely anything anymore. not even the trailing absence in first morning footsteps, not even the breath skips of shoulder brush strangers at a coffee shop. i am ceased and still starry eyed.

Devastation: New Orleans in your eyes, heartache of a smile pinned against those red wine cheeks. I am the lethargic wind breaking our seasons down into shapes and colors, I am the palm lines that spoil secrets and I am the rain that leaves water marks on sunsets. We used to feel adrenaline run through all of the stoplights in our veins, we used to feel the friction of a sky ripping at its velcro seams, we used to, we used to, we used to feel. And dearest : you were shivering the very last morning we saw each other, you had that baby blue soft pitch in your voice that says “I’ll never see you again.” I was so crooked, even with the way my body faked symmetry next to yours, but you would always just continue to breathe quietly, as if nothing existed to you. Nothing at all.