When you were born
You inhaled for the first time
But only so you could get enough air
To scream

When you were five
Your sneaking suspicions
About the difference between boys and girls
Were confirmed

When you were ten
Boys teased the girls they liked at recess
And you learned what the word
******* meant

When you were thirteen
You told your mom to *******
And spent the rest of the afternoon in time-out
Crying in your room

When you were sixteen
You kissed two people at a party
And felt a burn in your throat that didn't come from
Cheap *****

When you were nineteen
You bought a silver and blue ****
And smoked your lungs into burning embers
Leaped into flames

When you were twenty five
You painted pictures with coffee and grass stains
Your dog died and your parents didn't call to tell you
For two weeks

When you were thirty
You lost track of your life plans
In between job interviews and desperate long-distance
Calls to the wild

When you were sixty
Your hands were like newspaper
That had been folded and crumpled too many times
You read magazines

And when you died
The speakers at your funeral didn't mention
The pills that had struggled for so long to
Keep you alive

Elizabeth tells me she knows how I feel
She thinks my brain is filled with
Images of a different girl
Laughing and spinning and kissing with
You

Elizabeth says she's fallen in love before
With someone who danced
Just out of her reach
She says my eyes look tired and
My heartbeat is much too slow
I tell her how I've been feeling
Very tired and slow lately
So she nods like she understands

Elizabeth thinks I'm jealous
Of a whisper that glimmers
On the cusp of my universe
She thinks I could - even for a second
- think about anyone but you

Elizabeth thinks I'm mad at the world
She assures me you'd be better off
Laughing and spinning and kissing with
Me

Elizabeth doesn't understand when
I get up angrily
And tell her I'm not mad at anyone
I'm just resigned to
Watching you
Laugh with someone else
And spin around like a carnival ride
And kiss a girl with strawberry lips

Elizabeth believes that two lovers
Should end up together
I believe that
You love who you are
When you are with her
And that's enough for me

If this is what failure looks like, then it’s not such an ugly picture.

Her hair is sticking up all over the place, makeup is smudged around her eyes, or maybe it’s just dark circles from sleepless, toss-and-turn nights waiting for me.

Yeah, right.

“Been taking good care of yourself, I see.” Talking to her hasn’t always been like smoke signals in the dark. Once we spoke the same language, inscribed from an alphabet no one else understood.

She exhales and I swear I can hear cigarette ashes grinding in her throat. One eyebrow raises and a puff of smoke escapes lips I pray are chapped from the cold. Before she replies, empires rise and fall, the oceans erode a new continent; perhaps the entire ******* human race is gone.

“You’re not exactly the picture of health either, sweetheart.”

Her sarcasm is like a comma, and I learned to read long enough ago that I don’t really see it, but I understand its weight. Reliefreliefrelief rushes through me fast enough to make my head spin, a bit like swallowing the first sip of *****; painful. But no so much so that I couldn’t see getting used to it, eventually.

The future looks like nicotine kisses and nights where one of us whispers, “I’m lost, lostlostlost.” and one of us replies “Look up, please, look up. You’re home.”

She smiles and I realize I’m as close to forgiven as I’ll ever get this time around.

Am I a horrible person because
I am jealous of the way you bleed
Without cutting your skin open
I wish I was as luminescent
As the bruises on your heart
Shining like an oil spill
I will forever wish I could harvest
The ice from your veins
Inject it in my arm
And let the world see it all
With a smile on my face

I want to make love to your 3 am self
Smother your doubts with kisses
Caress the memories of your high school embarrassments
(You can be certain I wouldn’t
Tease at your insecurities)
But I’d pull on the place in your mind
That holds your half-remembered drunken nights
Gently hold the time you scraped your knees
In third grade
When nobody helped you up
I’d breathe over the cracks in your
Broken sense of belonging
Cover myself with your loneliness
And hitch a ride to
The first time a girl put her tongue in your mouth
(You said she tasted like hot chocolate
And sweat that was probably yours)
I’d carve us a hole in between your ribs
Where we could hide with
Our impending senses of doom
And I’d scale your mountains
Till I have left handholds
Etched into the side of your peaks
(I’d let you see my scary thoughts, too
Only if you promised me you’d check under the bed
Before we turned out the lights)

It’s not a new story;
Girl meets boy
Boy is beautiful
Girl is scared
(because every beautiful thing she’s ever seen has died)
Girl keeps quiet
Boy destroys himself
Girl spends her life alone
(her only comfort is she was right, in the end)

I am the rocks, and you are the ocean
Over and over again
Relentlessly
You rush up to meet me
And I am helpless
I cannot turn away
I could tell you its pointless
But I am hopeless and cannot speak
I would not blame you for giving up
You pool in my shallow places
Leaving bits of yourself behind
As you rush out again
You are not leaving, you are gathering strength
And you will never stop trying to smooth out
All my rough edges
~
I am the shore, and you are the waves
With a sound like wings
You come closer
The world holds its breath
Because that is how you affect people
They will all gape, amazed that you do not stay
You rush back out again
They will all gasp
They will be surprised when you return
But I know better
Like I’ve always known
I’ve memorized your rhythms enough
To know they’re eclectic
Your lyrics waltz around a strange, dark truth
Your melody squeaks like a rocking chair
And your bass line drops
Like a ship on ten foot waves
~
I am the land, and you are the sea
Cloudless sky and choppy waters
Fight in your eyes
Here is the place where the sky meets the ocean
There is the feeling I get at the edge of the world
And you are not the calm before the storm
Or the devastation scattered after
You are the still place inside of me while it rages
And you are always there
Even on the worst nights of winter
When everyone else heads for the mountains
I find you
Throwing yourself at the rocks over and over
Desperate to tell me your last secret
Whispering that summer will come again