For me, love has always been like sleepwalking. I never remember how I get there but there are always footprints behind me in the snow that appear to be the same size as my own. Somehow I ended up there again, with my face turned upward and the wind kissing it. Whoever compared love to warmth was lying. It is cold. It is the inch between solid ground and frozen lake that you can't see. It is the fog that clings to the tops of trees and softly whispers your name. It is the frost on your window that reminds you how easily things can break. The worst part of falling in love is falling out of love. The worst part of sleepwalking is waking up.
You woke up.

There’s something real ******* intimidating about a blank white screen.
It’s like there’s a glaring eye in every pixel,
and the cursor, in its intervals, stands stiff and haughty,

blinking again and again like a demand or like a question--
how, why,
                  when, what, why, why?

Camellia, you’re crazy;
          Camellia, you’re lost;

Camellia, there’s ***** beneath your bed—
lock the door and stop answering your phone.

Nobody really talks about how
their lovers swallow
between sentences, or **** their knee into your
girl parts
bruising them like a too ripe peach
between his dreams. I am having a hard
time being separate now,
when I have learned
all the things I can miss of his. Our tongues
pulsing in sync after swallowing
cinnamon,
music playing that does not match the thrusts
of him inside me,
changing clothes in front of each other,
a rose garden on my bottom
birthed by his palm,
little gemstones of wetness, how stray fuzz
clung to his beard more than I even
could, the certain words he
pronounces like
others. I came to trust their existence,
bits I was alright with not being able to predict:
separated, apart, alone, a divorce
and I have returned to
fearing the realization that we are not the
same person. We came so
close to
melting into our mixed body fluids, and I was
so happy because then he could
never leave me - if he touched another
woman, I would, too. I
would know
and feel everything and understand why it
happened. I would sleep upon
his adam’s apple until
he needed to swallow between words to her.
Being separate
is like having to pass on these things
nobody else cares about,
the torch, the Intimacy Olympics. I believe
the next person won’t notice what
he mumbles as he falls asleep at night. He
may as well not spoken
rather than it dissolve into the air. I
wonder if atoms feel this way when they split
or if they trust
in the science of what their
partner will do once they are gone. But
atoms do not pick up
the winter weather on their face like he does,
do not turn pink in the cheeks in
cold: nobody has
such beautiful things to miss as I do.

I wanted my taste-buds
to feel like sequins on the tip of his tongue, to be
something that
could attach to him and decorate
his insides. Maybe he would not hurt anymore
if everything looked beautiful
from his throat
to his intestines – like water washes
blood
away, dyes itself red to save someone’s wound,
I wanted us to trade saliva. Trade
mouths, he could have
my strong stomach. I could take the mud
out of his esophagus for keeps –
trade bodies like school lunches between friends.
To be as young as me again,
to build it all again
so he has veins of lace and vines connecting from
his heart to his lips, to my lips in case
I ever have to **** out
the flowers that never got to grow
inside him again,
taking up space he could use to just feel better.