It’s hard to live
A life un-private.

A seasonal home.

Sleeping on a loveseat,
In a room where the TV is always on.
Constant headaches.
Lights and sounds that stab.
She sits by screens
All
Day.

And wonders why she is sad.

I fear
It will begin to spread.
I can’t escape, especially not at night.

I think I’ll take a shower.

One of these days or years someone might invent a time machine.
Then we could go back like you need.
Back to fix what I have stomped all over,
Broken then taped back together best I could.
But I have slippery fingers ( and eyes ) and I broke it again and again.
Until our time machine, reality tells me that the past is unamenable.
So accordingly this breakup was inevitable.
We can't return to the perfect beginning of us.
Perfect in your eyes but not in mine.
So I'm crying but I hope this is for the best.
No other option but to wait it out for a time machine.

"Could we find somewhere to sit? Do you know someplace with like, benches, and a fountain or something?"
He sips at an Icee, less of an Icee and more of a blend of colored sugar and foam because the machine is on the fritz.

Keeps asking he if I want some.
I give in, the idea of our tongues hooking onto the same straw
Slurping up the same brownish slush
Makes me warm.

I know it shouldn't,
that it's wrong to feel this way.

Back to the question,
"You mean like James Street?"
I answer, laugh
Then regret it.
He gets embarrassed
When I point out silly things he says.

He thinks I'm smarter than him.
He's too brilliant for that to be true.
He smiles and turns away his face,
Shyness, feigned or maybe not,
"I should have known that."

We go there now, that place it feels like I've been to hundreds of times with him
But realistically it's probably a few dozen at most.

I tell him it's alright, stop blushing.
So here we are, where we used to sit in a summer long past
I thought I could be with him forever,
Deep and premature infatuation
Though still lingering and creeping back into my fore-mind at the worst times

I feel that something's crept back into his as well.
He's acting nervous,
Keeps saying things and getting embarrassed for no reason.

My chest empties,
I think two years ago
I'd be happier with this.
But it's now.

When I'm home I drift to sleep with one question swimming in my head--
How many people can you love at once?

“Haaa,” I sighed, releasing these stale tensions.
“I know it’s not so fair to be upset,”
But talks of ultrasounds and interventions,
Tinge everything that’s right with mild regret.

I sometimes ache for life as told by family photo albums,
And could-be love, as written in that diary,
Since everything once bright eventually succumbs
To  inevitable joy-expiry.

The abstract expressionists wanted
to



strip



their work of associations
yearning for pure emotion
I didn't understand
but now I do.

Every song I've heard before
heard now
reminds me of my hollow heart
voices and instruments as phantom limb-reminders.

So I find weird instrumentals
electronic
trip-hop
stuff I never liked, things with nothing tied to them.

No summer love
no winter warm kisses
or new year of uncertainty.

It's my escape
into some kind of sensation
for
now.

I’m not sure if
we’ll really spend
our lives as one
sharing days
and
living life in tandem.

I can't remember my dreams lately. I am frightened in my sleep. I tiptoe around in bed.
Sometimes I explode. He makes me.
I stop thinking about that and him and how I used to tiptoe around the world.
That house became my prison, my whole world.

Odd how something so unpleasant trapped me somehow.

I thought it would be good. It wasn't good. I wish it hadn't happened.
It makes me nervous to think about. I tap my foot very quickly when it comes to mind.

I have to get away.

I did but I didn't; not in my head.
In my head he is still upstairs, across the hall, and I have to lock that door, put a chair under the handle too, so he doesn't hurt me.
He didn't, but I always knew he would somehow.
If only I could have locked up my door, prevented that black mass of air, that stench of pathetic hate and crippling insult from infecting my entire being. A little like this old restaurant I've driven by, still reeking with the stench of tobacco from back when that was still allowed.
He's not here anymore but I can feel it. The afterglow.

After-shadow?

There is nothing like a disaster,
To sweep me with relief.

Beforehand stress and sadness fester,
Rob tranquility like a thief.

But once the impact passes,
And I have straightened some things out,
There's nothing like a disaster,
To make me grateful for a drought.

I sometimes worry
The pages will fly by
I wonder if I read
Closely enough

He's so sensitive and apologetic
when he remembers
he could lose me.

I like when he has to try.

Maybe he will change,
but who knows.

At least we're not married
with kids
and committed (fully).

Thank God.

Having been in his chair all day,
It wasn't clear
I did not know.
I did not realize.

At nine years old,
Nine that day, January 1,
How could I be blamed?

I went on about life.
I was not grown,
I did not notice,
I knew no better.

In fact, I don't remember hearing...
My mother's frantic voice,
The intermittent sobs,
The paramedics pulling up.

But in the wake,
In the subsequent hours and days and YEARS,
Ten or eleven years,
I've grown. I understand...

Those things now give me chills just to acknowledge.
I still can not remember the commotion, but that's not what matters.
That disaster didn't shake me, you know.

But his absence is the loudest sound there is.
It's rang in my ears for the past decade or so.
It's the loudest sound I've ever heard.