i started seeing the stars brighter when you left. started seeing myself
brighter. before, all i could see was
y o u .
i could barely see myself. my soul was starving and my heart worn,
falling into bed every night without taking time to change the sheets.
i hate to admit it, but i think i forgot how to be myself once i had you.
maybe it was the timing, and maybe i was just divided—my feet in
two doorways, leaving one place and entering another. i was stuck
in the hallway with starch-white walls and no light. and i ignored
it because i could, because i had you to distract me. but now i can’t
avoid it. i look at my life now and see it as cold, hard clay, aching
for my hands to turn it into something beautiful, something with
meaning. everything is falling, and i’m surrounded by empty water,
but i feel like i’m being reborn. i forgot how to look at the world
through my rose-colored glasses; lost them in my mother’s house
and settled for grey. that isn’t me. maybe i was too crowded by
rosebushes smothering me from seeing any sort of sunlight, but now
the soil is clear and all i can do is let the sun touch me until i turn into
something just as beautiful alone.

i wrote about a boy the night we met, glasses and a polka-dot
shirt i never thought would leave the stars and trees of that early
morning in august. it felt like a lunar eclipse, a moment where i stood
with my face up to the sky, straight on and uninhibited, but never
expecting the moment to stay. moments like these come and go, and
are accepted as fleeting; special dates to mark on the calendar, not
penciled in on every square. i believed that he was fleeting. that my
moons would always be grey. yet, i kept writing about him, a crimson
moon with a recurring theme of crimson feeling—full of passion,
anger, pain. i felt more inclined to write about him when my skin
would crawl, rather than when my heart would flutter. maybe it was
because our hearts were always beating, but never in time with one
another. i was afraid that my poems would become gravestones,
filling a cemetery of our almost love, hurtful reminders of what i’d
never fully had until,

now

my heartstrings are completely entangled with his, a mess of
indistinguishable shades of lavender that hum melodies of both
obsession and safety. when i left him in those early august hours, my
dreams of him faded the next morning. they turned to dust as soon as
the sun touched the horizon, for four hundred and seventy-two days.
i thought i’d lost something i’d never get back. i did. i watched our
mercurial infatuation die, and from its ashes rose a love like nothing
i’d ever known. and now my dreams of him stretch into the abyss of
time, eager and familiar, as if there’s only ever been crimson moons
hanging in the sky.