It's been months.
I've been bearing the weight of emptiness.
The absence of color on the walls and lipstick stains on post it notes I used to leave you.
The comfort i find in darkness is only there because light shows a world without you and its one I don't want to see.
Going back to the past is like a train ride with no destination on tracks made up of un-kept promises.
I'm sorry that I keep apologizing for still loving you.
I'm sorry that I keep waking up shaking in the middle of night, choking for air as I call out your name.
I'm sorry I still look for your face in the midst of crowded sidewalks.
I tried writing you a letter last night to explain to you the agony of living in this emptiness, but the pen broke, spilled ink on the page and I think it said more than my words ever will.
Despite the fact that you left me on the verge of breaking, I hope you're happy.
I hope that every cigarette you put between your lips knows how lucky it is to be there.
I haven't kissed you in months, but I'll never forget the way you taste.
I'll never forget the way I loved you when my named would roll off your tongue.
Nor the way it feels to be wanted by someone who could make love sound so bitter sweet.

Loving you was mistaking a welcome mat for an eviction notice and never knowing where to turn. It was stepping into empty rooms with white walls and never feeling more at home. Legend always had it that if you stare into broken mirrors you risk seeing yourself dead, loving you was staring into your eyes and getting the same result. My mother always told me that evil can disguise itself into everything you've ever wanted, I finally understood what she meant when I would watch you fall asleep and start calling out someone else's name. Sometimes I still hear your voice resonating off the walls and it sounds a lot like the door slamming on the day you left. Loving you had me digging graves inside flower gardens because I kept anticipating the mornings I'd find myself buried in dirt instead of in my sheets next to you. Loving you was putting suicide notes and love letters into the same envelope and sending them to address's of empty houses. Maybe someday they'll end up at my door again. Maybe someday you'll come back again. Maybe I die too soon to see the day. I don't know how the story ends. All I know is that I've swallowed a pill for every flower that died on "he loves me not", and right now laying six feet in the ground feels more guarded than your arms ever did.

I've always contested this theory of time.
This counting of sands in hourglass bottles.
They always said time was in our hands.
But I didn't mind because the sun always rose, always set.
I never yearned to stop it. I never yearned to stay.
Until I met you.
Until I found myself in your arms in the morning till dawn
and it never felt long enough.
Until the words that made me melt into puddles formed time tables that showed a past moment I never wanted to escape from.
From the falling of snow, to the falling of leaves.
The hands on clocks were slowly gripping us by the shoulders;
tearing us apart.
Wars with the one thing we couldn't defeat.
Until kisses could hold time for a moment, we could never get enough.
Inserting coins into machines so that maybe hope
could fall out of the slot into our empty palms.
Once the days got shorter as the air grew cold,
we had to dig up for good memories to keep us holding.
Your skin had already been traced by my fingers,
your lips had already been pressed into mine.
there was nothing keeping us together other than not wanting
to wake up alone at the sound of beeping alarms.
To wake up calls tellings us that life doesn't stop for anyone.
The cold coffee that tastes as bitter as remembering the battle with passing minutes.
Some battles are meant to be lost.
We lost this one, we were left with learnt lessons.
I never bargained for lessons in the first place, I wanted to be left with you.
Wars are temporary. We we're supposed to be forever.
But once again, forever is controlled by ticking hands.
And ours were never strong enough to resist it.

Open books with black covers containing stories never good enough to be read, words never long enough to contain the fragment of a thought. Maybe that's why I turn to putting my own in the complexity of poems, maybe that's why I'm never satisfied because I can never say what I mean. Sometimes I don't think you know what I mean, so if you haven't been able to read the between the lines; I miss you. I've been looking for so many ways to say it but none of them have been enough to make you come back. The thing about poetry is its never enough to make you feel the way I do. It'll never make you realize that ink seeps out of my pens with the purpose to make you feel something; but it never does. The thing about poetry is that you need to be empty to write it and that's why I learnt how to after you left. The shut door opened a new one which was the will to write about all the broken pieces of myself. The thing about poetry is it requires to see life through the eyes of things unspoken. Little do most know that mirrors and picture frames can speak novels of things forgotten which is me to you. The thing about poetry, is that I'm running out of things to say. I'm running out of words to spray on city walls, or carve in the wood of dying trees. The thing about poetry is that this isn't it. This is the goodbye, good luck. I have nothing more to bleed out for you, my mind is turning to dust. This is the last "I love you" I have left to write about, this is extended hands with empty palms.
This is the apology. It's me trying to feel something more than what I do, and as hard as I try to get there, I can swear that in nights of deafening silence I can still hear the sky screaming out your name.

Teach me to
swim
in the
sound-waves
of your voice.

His name means "dweller by the sea" and he loved the sea at first sight.
Coincidence?