one day everything falls apart. your hands and her promises and you heart. loving her turns into not sleeping. ever. that one day six months later when you finally saw her again and choking on not saying I love you before she left because you can't stand the thought of her not saying it back. the possibility. this ache. someone asks you what happened between the two of you and you say that even the continents came apart. they don't get it. you don't either. something breaks inside of you every time the wind blows and you smell her perfume. something harder than glass. they call this something hope. she knows where you live and she knows you never leave but she isn't coming back. make no mistake. there will be no surprise visits. no knock on your door at five a.m, no tear streaked hello's and no heartfelt I missed you's. no happy ending. no ending at all. just a belly full of whiskey and the last time she told you she loved you. her words feel like plagiarism in your ear. you wonder how her mother would feel about this. you wonder if her mother saw this coming a mile away. you wonder if her mother will always be right. you take another drink and wonder how this glass would sound as it breaks against your wall. the moment it leaves your hand you regret it. what a mess. all liquor and love sick and four a.m. the rorschach stains on this carpet from back when you were practicing for ava or evelyn or aiden. she picked the names. all the carpet cleaner in the world won't erase the memory. you wouldn't try even if it would. the empty chair theory doesn't soothe this broken heart of yours. nothing does. you pull another glass from the cupboard and see her lipstick stain on the edge. you imagine being small enough to jump from the top and landing hard enough to **** yourself but softly enough to not leave a stain. they would look at you and say, "I think this one was an accident." and they are wrong.

it still hurts in a way that's hard for you to explain to those who have never had to live every day knowing there are still pieces of your heart stuck inside someone else's chest. so what. so you still wear his old t-shirts to bed even though you know you should have thrown them out months ago, there are texts and photos on your phone that you can't bring yourself to erase no matter how many tears streak your face or how many times your heart breaks all over again. every single day you think of calling him, but only certain days are bad enough for you to actually contemplate it: days that used to be important and hold value - his birthday, your birthday, your anniversary, holidays - but then the obvious days turn into days where it hurts so deep that you look for reasons to call; it's raining and you want to say hey, remember that time we were in Sandusky and it thunderstormed so hard our whole hotel shook and lightening illuminated Lake Erie? remember how I was so scared, and you held me all night long? or when it's midnight and you throw on his old clothes even though they stopped smelling like his cologne an eternity ago, their cotton hasn't touched his skin in months but you wear them anyway because you resonate with that feeling, and you think of calling just to say that you wish you could feel him one last time. you do. you wish you could drive to his house again, you still know the way so well you could do it with your eyes closed, sneak up to his bedroom and crawl into bed with him even though you both complained it was too small for two people, you wish you could zip your fingers together like an old jacket, familiar and warm, you wish you could bury your face into his chest and smell his skin again, feel his lips kiss the top of your head as if this constituted saying I love you, I missed you out loud. the truth is you're more than well aware any combination of these things are very unlikely to ever occur, but that doesn't stop you from wishing, from picking up stray pennies or blowing out everyone else's birthday candles. do you remember the first time you saw a shooting star. how you were with him and how it felt a little like fate. you want to call him and tell him that you've never been so broken. that you believe you can go backward, because you don't see a forward that you like. but you can't. so instead you keep his name buried underneath your tongue. you don't cry when you miss him because no one understands it anymore; too much time has passed. get over it already. you keep his sweaters warm inside your dresser drawers and you wash the sheets weekly because they smell like someone else now. the bed never stops feeling empty. there are eight stop lights between your house and his, and this distance has never looked more red.

I want to open up my bedroom window and listen to the warm summer rain and call you and tell you I love you. That this morning I remembered how I'd try to massage your legs and you'd laugh so hard because your legs were ticklish and how I could never actually massage your legs and I love you. I want to ask if sometimes all these memories wash over you unexpectedly too, pulling you under, drowning you. I want to tell you that it's okay to call and tell me when it happens and that I love you and we can teach each other how to swim again. And I love you.

where i come from, people speak of peace as if it was, is and always will be an inanimate object of sorts. something far too great for mankind to reach out and grab, to hold, to touch. we speak of peace as if we do not live each day finding new ways to love ourselves and each other, as if we do not find solace in his arms or serenity along the creases of her palms. we have spent far too long searching for someone instead of somewhere to call home, too many yesterdays ago we spoke of prosperity in a sense that made us question our beliefs, something rooted so deep inside of us we lost sight of the peace we created with our lips, kisses that claimed every part of a heart that was stitched together with broken pieces of itself. hear me when I say that peace was never intangible, we hold it in our hands every day. the love letter you've read halfway through but stop before you get to the final "I love you" because laced within the lies is a good bye that you never agreed to, peace is freeing yourself from the anchors printed on card stock paper sealed by the lips of a girl whose name you may never forget. peace is 5 o'clock shadow sprinkled across his chin like cinnamon bun crumbs after six days of no sleep, spending each night celebrating the sunset and injecting the rainbow into his blood flow. it's the kind of high you'll never find laying along the bottom of the bottle at midnight when the world is challenging you to a mental fist fight, drinking yourself into amnesia or blowing out a cloud full of regret after taking a drag on your first cigarette. we were just freaks searching for peace in all the wrong places, we forgot how to live like each day was our last and started passing the time by wishing that it was. perhaps peace was most prominent in our childhood, like when you were a kid on the fourth of July and held a sparkler for the first time and your parents watched the fire reflecting in your eyes. when we were five peace was popsicles and nap time, we took the world by surprise and explored until our eyes were too heavy to continue. and since then peace has felt less like Popsicles and more like hour glass sand, slipping through our hands as if we never even held it at all. but hear me when I say that peace is a process of breaking down walls, it is composed of small symphonies in our heartbeats and the stories etched onto our feet from places we've been and sights that we've seen. peace is his hands and her hips, together again, love letters and Popsicles and skin upon skin.

take a crowbar
to my ribcage
use the scar
as a book mark
and let the dark
remind you
of the time
you said
you would find

better

You're mysterious.
You're mysterious in the way that makes me want to open you up like a book and read your pages from start to finish but I can't because you are so high up on the shelf that I cannot reach you.
You sit up on the shelf collecting dust trying to protect yourself from the people who will rip out your pages or bend your cover.
Oh, how I wish I could climb up the shelf and take you down and have you tell me your story.
Maybe one day I'll finally be able to climb and reach out to you, but for now, you're just the book I have yet to read and you're on my list.

we floated around in an ocean
of mediocrity
sharing poems etched into the skin
on our wrists
wondering when the weight of the world would drown us in our own thoughts
thoughts of people who didn't even know
we existed
places we would never go
and things we would never say
no one knows I still sing you happy birthday
in the room where you died in my arms
its only a metaphor, of course
I'm sure you're out there somewhere
in a city that could never care
about you
like I did
tattooing your skin with her bed sheets
and kissing over coffee tables made
of all the ways I'll never get to say
I love you
the coffee table you lay books on top of
but never read
or run your knee into and curse
under your breath
I imagine this is what loving you
would have been like
and still
the thought is enough to keep me up
at night