I feel alone in this
Place of instabilty and fear.
I did not know that love
Was so indeterminant,
So creatively malicious.
I want to be my own lover.
My own assurance.
But I also know you now.
And therefore,
My point is useless.

Could I tell you, if I wanted to?
All that is going on inside.
In one corner is all that I wish to be.
All that you make me feel.
The scent of watermellon.
The feel of your hand flat on mine.
The smell of your shoulder.
I touch the blades of grass and I think of you.
I think I am crazy.
I think I am in love.
I think I am stupid.
I know not what I am.
Not truly.
Maybe because I don't know what you are.
Where you are.
You look at me,
In my eyes,
And I feel connected.
Peaceful.
But entirely alone as well.
As if I know you but don't know you in equal parts;
It's not a contradiction I enjoy carrying.
On the other side is life.
The one that keeps moving while I stop to contemplate.
While I stop to look at you.
While I stop to smell the watermelon and look at the greenery.
It keeps moving.
And I stay back.
I think I need to.
There is a part of me that is unresolved in you.
There is a part of me that needs to know you
And who I am within you.
But time is painful.
The clock points at you, taunting me,
Reminding me that I am slow,
A turtle in comparison to a lion.
I do not know what animal you are.
If you are one at all.
If we are compatible.
Or if I am the prey and you the predotor.
Or maybe, simply, two different species.
Appreciative of one another,
Living in cohesion but never fully present.
I think I know you.
But I also know nothing at all.
This is what it is to currently love you.

There's a voice inside me that says I am home.
Like a watermelon or a sunflower.
Something natural and large.

There is also a voice that says I know nothing at all.
Not the smell of the sky
or the crunch of the dirt.
Instead, I am empty,
like a filter for air.
As though all passages have been opened;
No airway blocked.
As though the vents are fully opened
and I would let you walk through
if you wanted to.
But even so,
I do not know
what that would look like.

Your hair is pulled up in ringlets around your head
and I think I see you clearly
But then again,
Are you just an open vent as well?
And if so, what does that make the two of us?
What are we when the smells don't make sense anymore,
When the flower becomes unrooted from the ground?
What are we then?
What are we now?
Sometimes I think I know.
I feel like we are so many things
and yet all of it undefined.
I've never felt like there were so many possibilities existing at the same time.
And yet no label for any single one of them.

Your breathe reminds me to come back to the present
and I realize that the watermelon
is coming from the candle on the windowsill
the flower is a painting above your bed
and I am just a figure within it all.
A human with a heart and a mind
both open the way that a vent can be
both receptive the way that our senses can be
both bodies existing in a plane in which there is no reality clear enough for who we are.

I just wish there was one thing i was entirely sure of.
But then again,
Maybe there is.

The one thing I truly know for certain,
is that I miss us

when we

are gone.

I don't feel anything today.
Nothing.
No stirring sounds.
No limitless voices.
Just a silent reverence for noise.
Noises outside and within.
That's all I feel.
Noise
and
Nothingness.
It would be a great title for a book,
If I could only pick up a pen.
But the pen bleeds.
And so do I.
On the inside,
because my brain would be too ashamed to be known otherwise.
I've tried walking.
There is a peace in nature I wish I had.
There is a peace in some people I wish I had.
This must be what Michaelangelo's David felt.
A beautiful figure.
Made of stone.
This is what Notre Dame's gargoyles felt.
Loathsome creatures.
Made of stone.
This is what my soul feels like.
An empty vessel.
Made of blood and sinew
And stone.
An empty vessel
Sealed in stone.

Nostalgia is fire:
a flickering flame resting somewhere lightly on my collar,
like the lipstick of a woman that once told me she loved me.
The kind that is soft and wet
and so so red.
It is a reminder of things done with no regard for anyone but us.
It is a reminder of night skies,
blue clouds hidden somewhere amongst the lack of color;
an enveloping darkness that is tender and warm
with just the slightest hint of rainwater.
She sits beside me, her red dress only slightly as stunning as her mouth,
blue nails not quite as perfect and flawless as her bluish eyes.
Her hand is also a hug.
She sets it on my knee cap.
And then the crooked space inside my arm.
And I am held afloat.
Not dissimilar to a spacecraft,
or two hawks grooming one another.
She is purple:
Layers of red and blue stacked along the tops of one another.
She is purple grapes ripened and smashed
siphoned into a bottle
and placed to my lips.
She is a soft place to land.
She is a soft place to kiss.
She is a soft place to touch.
She is every sense wrapped up neatly in a box;
every sense wrapped neatly in purple.
She is, in every sense,
All that is all of me:
Nostalgia.
Rainwater.
Purple fire.
She is a cradle for all that is all of me.

You are the girl that sits with me,
the mirage of long blonde hair thrown over your shoulder,
Shoulders alittle too wide for your liking
But,
To me, perfect.
The perfect place to set my palm, or my head, or my words.
You kept them soft.
All of me, soft.
For moments.
For months.
For years.
It never ended, that spot on your shoulder,
The way I felt about it.
The way I felt about you.
You
are not that girl anymore.
And I
do not need a shoulder..
But the pillows still feel like you at night.
The brush you used to comb my hair with
still soothes me, even though the needles
have long been thrown away.

You don't understand.
And I wish you would.
Maybe if you knew,
You would return, just once.
Let me rest on your shoulder just one more time.
If anything, just to prove that the shape has changed.
That maybe your arms have been scarred with the ink of your husband's tattoos.
Or that they have become muscular with the weight of carrying your newborn son.
Maybe I could say goodbye, then,
If I could feel that they had changed,
And you along with it.
But I can't.
And you don't.
And my pillows still feel like you.

So
I fall asleep every night,
Still dreaming of your arms.

Maybe one day
You

Will decide

To release me.

You are the girl that sits with me,
the mirage of long blonde hair thrown over your shoulder,
Shoulders alittle too wide for your liking
But,
To me, perfect.
The perfect place to set my hand, or my head, or my words.
You kept them soft.
All of me, soft.
For moments.
For months.
For years.
It never ended, that spot on your shoulder,
The way I felt about it.
The way I feel about you.
You
are not that girl anymore.
And I
do not need a shoulder..
But the pillows still feel like you at night.
The brush you used to comb my hair with
still soothes me, even though the needles
have long been thrown away.

You don't understand.
And I wish you would.
Maybe if you knew,
You would return, just once.
Let me rest on your shoulder just one more time.
If anything, just to prove that the shape has changed.
That maybe your arms have been scarred with the ink of your husband's tattoos.
Or that they have become muscular with the weight of carrying your newborn son.
Maybe I could say goodbye, then,
If I could feel that they had changed,
And you along with it.
But I can't.
And you don't.
And my pillows still feel like you.

So
I fall asleep every night,
Still dreaming of your arms.

I can't change it.

Maybe one day
You

Will decide

To release me.