i grew up in a room with movie posters and glow in the dark butterflies, drawing faces on the walls with chalk, and never straying far from my kingdom of bed sheets and pillow cases.

you grew up praying to god that the thing you called your family wouldn't break like everyone else's had, and hoping that the places you traced your fingers over in your dusty atlas actually existed.

but your dysfunctional family did break, and your 3rd grade teacher told you that those far off destinations were real, but that it was unlikely you would ever get to see them all.

i grew up on historical fiction, penny boards and rock and roll. My only god was springsteen, and i held faith in the belief that i truly was "born to run."

you were raised on pick up trucks, bluegrass tunes, and the moonshine that your father turned to after a hard day at work. you were destined for a life full of nothing and clocks stuck at 2:59.

happiness had always come bearing sticks and stones and run down chevrolets, and all the rain signified was that it was time to open your grey umbrella again.

you only ever saw me in black and white, and i've always believed that i speak the language of loss far more fluently than most people i know.

she breathed her name
into the snowy atmosphere,
but it dissolved into
vapor.
so then she whispered
it to the powdered ground,
but it sunk into the ice.
next, she tried to speak it
to the frozen lake,
but it disappeared
into a residue
of crystalline particles.
finally,
she cried it out
to the inky covering of stars,
and it echoed through the hilltops,
reverberated among the highest
everglade branches, and sounded
throughout the candlelit town.
she yelled it again,
to the high soaring birds
and blanket of clouds,
to the rooftop and
telephone wires,
and she found
that she enjoyed the sound
of her name
being repeated
through
the constellations.