I write a lot about love and about the smell of rain. They go hand in hand, after all.
They both make my heart ache and my mouth water for something I don't yet have.

a day is not a day without yawns early in the morning and hushings late at night.
not a day without a nervous laugh, an anxious frown, a skip and jump from the heart.

a night is not a night without a a drifting off at the brush of the late hours and a jolt awake at 3 am
not a night without a reaching and tugging, a discovering of loneliness in the folds of comforters.

something had settled in my lungs again. it's been there before, a familiar restlessness. but before, i threw it up in the form of late nights and lost love. this year i hold it in palmfuls, like a bird or water.

my legs feel full of bees, of ants and moths trying to stretch towards light. cross, uncross, stretch and coil. do anything to remain unsettled, unsedimented. but they can't escape the unrest. it just waits.

i think of it like sediment, silt that sometimes has a hand run through it or a toe seeped deep into its coolness and then it stirs through my veins alongside every particle of anxiety i've inherited.

is this what it's supposed to look like? a little dim and maybe foggy on the darker days. sometimes i think about letting this fog out into the chilly room of someone else, but it retreats just in time.

beds were designed for tired bones, nights designed for weighted eyes. days were made for the ones with fingers full of light and flowers were made for it all. the night comes easier to me, like a friend.

January isn't my usual month of bee-legged unrest, or heavy lidded nights, but it seems to have assumed the role of injecting something not settled into the crook of my neck, my elbow and the soft part behind my ear.

the dreams are the most horrifying. they come to me in resin-covered gems, sparkling like little tears. they wreath my sleep in lazy circles and make me sleep too deeply.

you spoke to me in a voice like blame last night. i stared at you with fire in my lungs, seeping smoke into the space between us.

i think i love you still, a muscle-tense love with shivers down its spine. what's that love called? is it tough love? maybe hate? something more anxious?

i wake up crystalized and pulled fresh from the water. and you follow me on the tails of my weariness throughout the day.

you did choose somebody new, although she doesn't know she's the leader of a few swamp-hearted girls. they **** him in and spit out a monster.

can you ******* sick-sweet longing? is it dripping from your rafters, from the eves of you? i send it to you sometimes, bow wrapped and heavy.

there were four nights that kept me held down with blunt teeth and little hushes. you soft edged memories in my head provided the dark with fodder.

It's been a year.
A year since the night I was last in love.
Or realized that I was in love.

It's been a year.
A year since the evening I cried as the sky turned blue, orange, pink, purple, black.
Since I cried as the night stumbled in.

A year seems like not a very long time.
Not a long time yet it feels like it's been three years.
And maybe I've grown, or maybe I've just changed.

It's been over a year since you laid with me while thinking about her.
Since you've pressed yourself against me while knowing she was yours tomorrow night.
Over a year since you told her that you were hers forever and I was yours for always.

And now, a year later, she and I are friends, and I still mumble about you in my sleep sometimes, and I wish that I hadn't known how soft your betrayal was.

I think of everything I will never be
And I grow infinitely more uncomfortable in my skin.