there are a million stars and half a million gas stations between you and me but that doesn’t equal distance. day breaks, day shatters into evanescent pieces that float on the edge of my conscious mind, but you are the constant. your eyes the color of ground hazelnuts have always been my constant.

it doesn’t matter that we are separate beings because, here, in the light of a setting sun and a milky twilight, we are one. we are melted together like hershey kisses in a bowl on a summer evening and worry is not a word and slowly, you become my kryptonite.

missed phone calls, missed deadlines, missed laughs. i used to count your sneezes in the biting chill of early february and wrap your arms around my waist so i could feel like something was keeping my balloon from flying into the void where lost balloons go. i blame myself for letting you hold on until i finally took flight, spreading my wings out behind me like an angel's and kicking the invisible dust into your face.

now there are two million stars and a million gas stations between us because i am trying to forget that you ever broke the carefully crafted walls that contained all of my closeted skeletons.

i’m starting to remember why i never liked hazelnuts.

i am a mess of broken strings and branching neurons that will never quite reach their intended purpose and i am a creature that loves like arsenic. i am curling flames that make their way into your heart and nest there with no intention of ever leaving and this is my problem; i never know when it is time to take my inhibitions and my shortcomings and get on a bus that will drop me off in your left ventricle, where i can smooth out my broken pieces and start again. i am a bird who can't fly and relies on others to take me up into the clouds because my potential overshadows my reality and i have never learned to escape mediocrity as it chases me onto a dead end street. i am all parts and no wholes; i am all fragments that won't fit together and no amount of glue will repair my shattered sense of self or my crippled brain that loves so intensely it drives people away. i am a line so long i can't even begin to look for the front so i settle into waiting and let it become my personality, let it become my everything because here is now and there is then and the timeline of my life has never been a straight line; it has always been a zigzag of humanity that folds back in on itself despite my mumbled protests. i am not a phoenix - when i have burnt to ashes i do not wish to be reborn because i have always been a loaded pistol and embers don't mix with gunpowder (i know this because i have been an inevitable explosion since the day my mother first held me in her arms). i am a surplus of pride and shame in the form of hidden tears and crumpled papers but i have always been older than my years and the anomaly in me has never been extinguished; maybe this is why when i look down at myself, i see only marks and freckles and imperfections instead of the blinding glare of my rattled soul. i am Hiroshima with its enormous power (too great to be contained) that dissolves my judgment into fine white powder and scatters it over dead soil like a twisted mosaic on a mottled canvas. i am poison - you will know this part of me if you reach past my organs into my core where my fears rest, if you get too close for comfort and my electric fence of a heart shocks you back. i am a being that never learned to love the right way so i love all the wrong ways and if you get caught in my crosshairs from where i stand above, you should run. i never learned how to escape myself, or my arsenic heart, and this is my problem. this will always be my problem.

The majority
of my existence
consists of wandering in
the crinkled creases
of my cranium,
waiting for another soul
to pass by this
shattered *******.