I can still feel your touch like you’re pressed against my leg, even now. So careless and reckless with my fragile and cold body, all your warmth seeping into me and threatening to make me rise from the ashes and love you like a phoenix.

Again and again and again I turn myself to ash to escape you and again and again and again you cruelly, unwittingly, find my eternal flame.

You smile at me, a lot, so patient and kind and I wish you wouldn’t. I don’t think you would if I was transparent, if your smile could go right through me to the other side. I don’t think you would if you knew how much I love you even still, so willing to take your smile as a siren song and shipwreck the whole crew without a second thought.

I’m getting better, you know, fighting hard to crawl out of the same cave I’ve always been coming back to, way before you. But I can see some sunlight through the clouds and for once, you don’t control when it rains or shines.

That’s the definition of getting better, I know it is. So why is every single thing you do as sharp as an arrow to a heart I’ve been trying to **** all this time, another stone in my pocket as I debate drowning myself in the river?

You know, I don’t even like the city because of you. Because you hated your life with me so much, you get to relocate and start over. Burn down everything good about the time we spent together.

I’m green, so green all over, I know it. I don’t even miss you, but God, I hate Kansas City.

I want to hate him as much, too. I have it in me to do that. So willing to give into the darkest part of myself and blame you for it when I know it’s been there all along.

I can’t. I can’t hate him. Because he seems like everything I couldn’t be for you and I can’t hate you because you’ve always deserved to be with someone who could return your smile. Who you would smile for even if they were transparent and you could see through to the other side.

All I can really hope is that you’re not in love with him.

I loved you first, indeed.

Looking at you has always been so oddly like staring into the sun. Being around you a unique and private pleasure I did not deserve. So I guess it would make sense when I’m stuck in this eternal twilight, waiting for your too bright sun to set, I would want you more than anyone else.

I’ve been trying. To stay away. Because I know this burden of unrequited love is not mine alone to bear. But nothing is helping. Not a thing.

And when the sun sets--if it ever does--I’ll probably be thinking of you when the sun rises again. I know people say the night is always darkest before the dawn and I believe that, I do. But you have become the dawn, the mid afternoon sun hanging so heavy in the sky, all the pinks and oranges of a sun that never sets.

I don’t want you to be a sun that never sets.

A prisoner of my covetous heart. I’m sure the stars and the moon are probably pretty good to look at, too and I haven’t seen them since the moment I saw you.

But you can break my heart a million times and still I won’t let you set and it’s tearing me up from the inside out. And it’s out. I’ve become some bitter, selfish shell of the person that fell in love with the girl who was too bright and shining to look in the eyes.

And I know that’s all you see. The shell. But I can promise that inside me is that stupid eternal summer. Beaches and sand and a boundless heart with your name on it. And how am I supposed to destroy my last best thing?

You always act so hurt when I turn away from your blinding light, but friends don’t break each other’s heart.

Please please please please help me make this sun set. I’m ready to sleep on you.

What if I started calling you what you really are? Here are some possibilities:
the ashtray taste in my mouth after three cigarettes
the calculations of how tired I’m likely to be when my alarm goes off at seven in the morning without you
that acid taste when my heart climbs up my throat with the alcohol
the gnawing crawling insomnia that’s partly about you but can certainly be traced back to thinking about the way you smile when your face is really close to mine
the potential liver failure or at least what my liver has been processing straight into my bloodstream every hour
the warm hum when I turn my truck on to drive you home--you’ve stopped asking me, I always drive you home, but you don’t call me chauffeur. In fact, you pointedly don’t call me anything but my name, my whole ******* name
your arms tightening around me in the back seat and your face--your smile--pressed against my shoulder
your throat when you swallow Fireball like it doesn’t burn you inside out (you burn me inside out)
you apologized to me twice and I know you don’t apologize
the queen of wands the queen of wands the queen of wands
the fact that all my pooled, vague desire has started calling you by name. I’ve never felt it say anyone’s name and it won’t stop talking about the small, quiet, beautiful things in my life that have everything and nothing to do with you

About what?

I’m still bleeding internally from every time I’ve crashed into you like a wave, picking thorns out of my side that you’ve stuck there by omission, spitting my teeth out to show you everything I say is the truth, pressing cigarettes to my bare skin because you still want to be in my life.

In my life.

Despite the fact that you were cement on my ribcage and I ripped you off with my own bleeding hands so hopefully, at some point, I could jump back in the water without drowning on you, and you-- you keep calling me back to land, ensuring that I will never be capable of swimming until I’ve “talked” to you.

I have talked.

Drunk, high, so sober it brought tears to my eyes. If you doubt that all of my cards were always on the table, you don’t know me well enough to sink me like a stone (and I’m still sinking every minute of every day. I’m just teaching myself you’re not going to be the one throwing the life raft).

I am raw, transparent, hard to swallow around, and I have told you how I felt. I stopped sheltering you from the depth of my feeling the second you read me like a book and sitting in the back of your car, this bright white distance between us (that’s always been between us) I didn’t even hide this grating, dragging, bleeding rage. And I said what needed to be said-- you have not and will never love me.

And if that’s the statement you’d like to talk about, I’d rather not so I don’t have to go back and retrace it in every single word you’ve ever said to me since we met.

But you are also a vice--the clapping kind, the suffocating kind, the tethering kind, and the sooner I figure out how to make my own key, the better off for both of us. This is not solved by talking.

In fact, all we’ve ever done is talk.

Frankly, I’m sick of the sound of my own voice.

I spend so much time thinking love is being a kamikaze pilot--if I am so willing to destroy myself for you, surely you see the depth of my feeling.

But you’re right, I bet. Right to avoid the people so willing to burn themselves alive in enclosed spaces in your name. Who’s to say that I wouldn’t nosedive with you on board? Just because I have no concept of self-preservation doesn’t mean you don’t either.

And a friend said, in the dark, with flickering fire shadows all over her face, that I know what I want in love and I believed her--believe her--but I don’t know what that means about wanting you.

You are nothing like what I want in love--careless where I’m careful, free where I’d like to be still, sensitive about things I’ll needle, not a cuddler, stamping on all the fires I want to ignite in you and me.

And if I know what I want, why do I keep crashing against you hoping the result will change? I keep thinking crash enough times, one time you’ll break, but I’m your eternal kamikaze pilot.

And I know all about the supposed virtues of persistence, but if you don’t love me and you never will, watching me die for you over and over again has got to be terrible to watch. I can’t promise I’ll stop doing it, but I can promise to keep all deaths out of eyesight and keep my mouth shut. Even when I’m drinking. Even with my heart on my sleeve. Even when I’m asleep and should be allowed to dream about crashing into you.

I love you, but I need to learn that it doesn’t have to be a death sentence.

I don’t know why, above all things, love should be fair to me.

To me.

Who has probably never been fair to anyone who’s cared for me in my entire life. I’m far too blind to wait for anyone that’s been trying to catch up with me and far too impatient to work and get anyone to slow down enough for me.

And I still cling to the idea that love should be, above all things, fair to me.

And, really, how do you say, “I look at picture of you and it hurts my chest how badly I want you. Any of you you’re willing to give me and I don’t mean to beg, and I don’t want your pity, but I want you so badly it feels like it’s burning my skin inside out.”

And really, how do you, in turn, say “I genuinely like your attention and your regard for me and I wish I was a good enough person to love you the way you love me, but I’m not and likely will never be, but don’t stop because it’s worth it to me to keep you hanging around.”

Love shouldn’t make you a terrible person, but I’m a worse person the more I try to reach out and pull people down because I catch all the wrong ones. I don’t let them go and I say things I will never mean. Because I just want to someone to hear me so badly. Not even to listen, just to hear.

But my chest really does cave when I’m unprepared to see your face. It’s not a heart racing thing, that’s all fine and well, it feels like my heart just ceases to be when I can see her.

And when has that ever been fair?

To me.

It’s not about falling in love with people you can’t have or even anyone who will have you (although both are true and in small, destructive ways have served you well), it’s about even trying at all.

You are so unwilling to move, even as you are so incredibly willing to be moved. And you can write all the prose poetry you want about how you imagine her or how you feel she has done you a disservice or how you are standing with your arms wide open and your heart on your sleeve, but you know how love really works.

It’s taking small, scary steps toward each other and there is a lot less falling than talking with tears in your eyes and hearing things that make you wish the world could stop when she parted her lips, and to this point, you’ve only been willing to do the first few things, as if loving the idea of a person would be enough to make them real when you’ve known the whole time that falling in love is just work that you’ve been unwilling to do.

I wonder if anyone has written a poem solely so that one day someone would see it tattooed on a girl’s inner thigh.