How can you say I go about things the wrong way?

Do you remember the summer night I pulled you
by the hand to find fireflies? I could not believe
something so small, so delicate, could hold
so much light. When they went to sleep we laid
on our backs with a bottle of wine between us and stared

at the stars. You used your scientist’s eye to show
me the constellations I’d never been able to spot
before. I loved the idea of a story unfolding
in the stars and you loved the idea of us.

When the wine was warm and I could find the Big Dipper
without your help, we undressed by moonlight and jumped
in the envelope of the lake. We pretended everyone
else was asleep and could not hear our words of ***
and love and mortality. Just as they could not see my legs
wrap around your waist in water too deep to see

the bottom. That night I asked you how you needed
to be loved. You said you didn’t know
how love felt until we met, but sometimes, you would lie
awake next to me at night and wonder, “is this it?”

And how can you say I go about things the wrong way
when I did the human thing and loved you in the only way I know?

And we are humans and need to be loved, but just because you love
someone does not mean they have to love you back.

And just because you once loved someone does not mean you should continue.

I am a poet who fell in love with a scientist.

I wrote him odes and pulled him through the grass to look at the stars.
He read studies on how to love me and pointed at the placement of the planets.

I saw his traits as the ingredients to compose a flawlessly flawed face.
He saw them as biological components to create a recipe for evolutionary disadvantage.

I knew that I loved him because I felt it in my bones.
He woke up beside me and pondered, while I slept, if he truly did me.

I saw him as the perfect person.
He saw me as trial three in this experiment of the heart.

His hypothesis: I will always love you
The results: Hypothesis proven wrong

My head is floating and balance shaking
And my shell is cold to the touch.

The skin under my fingertips is tingling
And i cannot tell if it is the cold from the balcony thawing,
The rain dripping through the slats freezing,
Or the memory of your heart in my hands.  

I think of how tempting the offer is to climb
Into another and another and another man’s bed.
And so I charm and dangle my body and words,
Angled so they will drip into their open palms
And they will drink with reckless abandon.  

And I hear them still outside, words oozing in,
And I hear them devise plans of your demise
And I still hear you echoing endlessly in my ears
And somehow you win.

Or maybe it is the smoke still in my lungs that i carried back inside.

There sit the scuffed soles
lying on the bedroom floor
collecting dust on their gleaming tops.
Sometimes,
they move, from room to room,
quietly clicking and clacking
echoing hollowly through the hall
moved by a woman of air.
Sometimes,
he sees her.

I knew that I was beginning to care about him
when I asked him about the train tracks on his wrist.

I noticed them the night we met,
illuminated by flickering candlelight.
I asked him about his mom and his dad,
his sister and his friends,
his high school and his college,
trying to find the moment
where life twisted and turned wrong.

The question spilled out of my mouth.
I tried to catch it, but it had already overflowed.
He clapped his right hand to his left wrist,
as if trying to stop the no longer flowing blood.

The last boy I loved stared with sweetness at knives
and he sliced his skin as a sacrifice
to the man he wanted to be.

We sat on a park bench the summer we were seventeen
and he grabbed my wrist and he drank my lies.
But he did not mention it. And I did not mention it.
And we raced each other to die.

I have found that there are many ways to hurt yourself.
I have found that many people I love are hurting themselves.
Writing about being desperate to die,
trying to expedite the process.
Hiding weapons under pillows,
pressed like petals between the pages of books.
We do not see one another.
At least, not in time.

When I am at his left side,
I run my right hand over the inside of his wrist.

I want kind fingertips to have touched
the painful spots although they cannot erase.
I want his skin to know it deserves softness
and not sharpness, not all the time.
I want to thank him
for letting his cuts become scars.

I want to thank them for staying alive.