How do you let go of something
that you could only love pieces of
but still loved just as ferociously
as if you were to love the whole?

It’s like trying to let go of something whole
when you only held a few pieces of it to begin with.

The smell
that once
used to linger
in my hair
because of you

now only lingers
in all the places
you are not.

- Everywhere.

One of the hardest challenges with writing
is the honesty in it.

Our whole lives we are taught to filter our thoughts,
make them psss through our minds before our mouths.

With writing, the whole point is to allow the words to come out unfiltered and raw.
We must enable them to come from the heart without passing through too much of our minds.

When they ask me why I stayed so long
I explain that because of you
I never ran out of things to write about.

Looking back,
I wonder whether all along
I was looking for a lover
or a writing prompt.

As I lay in a tangle of sheets,
hands clutched over heart
as if shielding it from a dagger
that had already been stuck inside of it,

I marveled at how easy it was
for him to break me and my heart once and for all
when all I ever did
was give over my broken pieces

to make him whole.

As I stand still in the river,
the current pulling at my heels,
I hear you complain about the raging river that seems a trickle of water to me.

You talk about the water being too loud to think,
the water not being clear enough to see through,
the river becoming too deep.

And I laugh.

For once, I am proud of myself
as I inwardly recognize
that you would drow in the most shallow depths of my mind
that I have been swimming in for years.