Not much happens anymore, ever since you left because you thought death was a better companion then me. I always wondered who it was you were sending notes to. There was never a return address.

It's much quieter now. I'm left alone in this now bigger home. The click and tick of the clock is the only sound that can overcome the silence that lays against the floor, making the air seem concrete so you feel all you can do is creep around this house.

They wanted to take your pictures down from the wall. The ones that took you hours to create. The ones that you spent hours drifting from shop to shop in order to find the perfect frame to frame perfection. I guess photos were one thing that you always had in control. I couldn't let them take them now.

In the silence, it's harder to sleep. It's harder to soak up the darkness that tickles my feet, because even though you no longer steal the blankets my feet are still never covered. I guess we keep some old habits, even when the old friends move on.

My mother is worried for me. She says I spend too much time in this grieving house. She says I need to stop addressing letters that will go unanswered, she doesn't know that I send these words to you. I open the letters and face each paper towards mirrors wondering if you will see them there. I'm told I stay there for hours, but it never seems that long.

Why did you never talk to me?

When one sees death and pulls back the rot, we call this reunion. When the nights are longer, when the moon continues to shine even at noonday and the world wonders just how long it takes for a man to forget his given name, and remember what he really is.

When mushrooms grow out of panicked fingertips and cleave to the sky above while being buried, we call it desperation. When the boy remembers just how deep the earth really goes, and begins to forget that a man needs to breathe.

When flowers bloom right beside graves and flies become the most recent pollinators, we call it coincidence. When a family scatters into every direction of wind and whim, and starts to forget that the earth was where it all began.

That's how it goes and goes. That's why the world is left spinning like a record stuck on a tired lullaby song. We still haven't realized, nor do we care to remember the fact that we have not been here all that long.

the most peaceable places end up under willows, shrouded with angelonia clusters against lilac streams. framed by a clover carpet, granite stones sprinkled across flowered ground. there is little history here, bones buried in grass tiled earth.

terra-cotta ground keep treasured secrets. no one hears any stories the earth could whisper into rose-colored ears. melted, molten, muddied metacarpals, sternums, ribs, and tibias moored against dirtied pits covered over to become unknown graves.

it seems the most peaceful here.

I would not say I love you. Those words always seem to catch halfway up my throat the way seaweed wraps around the pillars of a dock. Those three words are fleeting and have always seemed to fly with ocean drawn winds, traveling far out into sea - leaving a poor little me to wonder just how far those little words can travel before I can convince myself that they never existed.

I never meant to fall in love with you. I never meant to have feelings for a boy, or to smile at the thought of your bashful lips flirting with the idea of a quick-wit comment or rather a flickering flame. I never meant to see a boy in the mirror and wonder what it would be like to wake up every morning and seeing another boy standing just behind me in a bathrobe smiling. The smell of coffee grinds and burnt toast make me think of sunday mornings, wondering just how I fell in love with you.

I say love is accidental but it's no wonder it seems to happen so regularly like hurricanes during monsoon seasons or southern migrations of geese on september wings. I keep telling myself that it all started with the little things. It seems less frightening that way. It seems less intimidating that way, in the same fashion that seeing pictures of Everest make climbing the Himilayas seem achievable for a person like me, someone so uncertain.

I would say I love you, but you would know I'm lying. I might see you in the mirror every morning, but I see a astronomically stable star woman in my dreams. My body and mind may say it's meant for you now, but this love was never meant to stay, it is being drawn to someone else in longingly slow and soft lake-laughing waves.

If you close your eyes tight enough, little, big words, like 'love' become a little easier to say.

It's never easy to talk about depression. For some reason people worry that saying it's name will make it spiral down on top of you, and so they lay any mention of chronic sadness to rest. Letting it fester.

When people ask about depression they expect simple synonyms like: sadness, tired, unmotivated, weak, faking, unreal, imaginary; for example. They expect quick metaphors of sinking beneath deep waves, and weights being placed on thin chests. But it's sometimes hard to believe the truth of it all.

Because truth is, depression is not like anything you would expect. It's like having the winter Alaskan sun set in between your rib cage, like having melting ice floes sliding between your teeth, it's like having cosmos placed within your head and you begin to wonder where people really go once they are dead. It's seeing caskets instead of fingers, grave markers in place of toes, with sun-dried heat melting your heels till they look like cracked crayons on an elementary school table.

For six months each day felt like six drawn out years of playing an apocalypse, of wondering if it's really worth it to bend your knees and get out of bed. For six months I plastered the greatest **** smile for each day, so that it was me, not a star in the sky that heated the Sahara, only to come home to avalanche covered snow banks that quickly settled to become my home.

The issue with feeling sad for days, or weeks, or months, or years; is that no one understands till they understand it for themselves and even then; there seems to be little they can do to help.

The truth is, I don't know what day my body began feeling inner peace again. I don't know what time my bones seemed to slip back into each cradled socket. But I got there. You'll get there too.

quiet. still and silent, a little taste of mystery to hold us over in panic. let the fear drip from the walls as they close in, bandages adhering to our cracked and breaking lips. a silent screaming sigh, that plays out the cords of misery's disappointment in discovering that speechlessness has found us first.

a cold touch down our spine like the drip of winter water from a decade old rain pipe, set on a roof of rusted, warped tin. a scrape of nails down iris purple shoulders pushed deep into the skin, but we are told to stay quiet about the truthfulness of things.

but little consequence, and little fear. for much longer we won't be left down here, though we might miss the quiet. voices travel better through cement and rebar walls. little whistles of laughter and slight mania, but left alone who wouldn't find comfort in the crazy.

for we have lost the longing for fear. it seemed to disappear after spending a few years resting here.

it was surprising the first night I saw you right before me. skin imprinted with the pattern of lace, the light scattering in a cacophony of projections against your porcelain skin. lightning marks against your throat and thunder rumbling in your eyes. it was unexpected.

in no way were you tame. fragile, perhaps. superficial, undoubtedly. beautiful, certainly. but never tame. never would your wrist be bound. the sharpness in your teeth and flick of your flesh would never allow anything so shallow as domesticity.

you were raised out of the authentic. molded from clay, the word "impossible" placed under your tongue and mouth closed shut. a shattered childhood born from an indian-summer sun frosted by wildflower springs.

so here I stood, gazing up at ceramic wonder. earthen-ware and glazed glass. a sculpture of femininity by all aspects, by all respects. left to become memorialized in a wilderness, little time noticed.