this poem
is not about you

even though
your spirit is in every word
your voice sounds strong
in the halls of my mind
telling me things
I am now sure
I want to know

this poem is
about me

trying to understand
you

I follow rainbow gutter rivers back to my empty downtown apartment.
When I was young, I looked up at these buildings in awe.
Shiny glass towers full of giants,
staring down at me, ant-like and enamored.
You looked beautiful in your wedding dress,
they said.

A decade spent selling disposable garbage to the masses,
rereading Ogilvy on Advertising and wearing uncomfortable shoes.
Today I’m one of those giants.
Do you still throw darts at my picture?
Do you ever think about me,
at all?

A thousand miles away, a little girl asks her mother,
to make her a cherry pie for her birthday.
She knows it’s my favorite.
If we have cherry pie, maybe he’ll come to my party,
she says.

Seven drinks later, I told my dad I was miserable.
A hollow shell of anything I’d ever planned to be.
He didn’t believe me.
After all, I had never let him down,
before.

The last time we saw one another, we ate dinner on the floor.
You smelled like you’d been on fire.
A week later, I found a strand of your hair in my bed,
and sighed.

It was nearly sunrise when I arrived,
leaving a trail of clothes all along my floor.
Lying in bed, I thought about how long ago yesterday was.
All those slow summer mornings,
and three-day goodbyes.

I stare down at the streets below,
as innocent wide-eyed dreamers shuffle their feet on cold sidewalks.
Somewhere a young boy leaves home for the first and last time,
and I think about how beautiful you still look,
in photographs.

I've been keeping a journal of trips I wish you'd taken with me.
An album of photos you should have been in.
A list of nights I wish you'd spent in my passenger seat.

I've been collecting all of our favorite pieces of myself in a mason jar;
Fireflies to leave by your bedside so if you wake up in the middle of the night you won't feel alone.

I know too well the hourglass purgatory that is your absence;
Frighteningly similar to the sensation of waking up in empty darkness, unable to remember falling asleep.

my world changed today
and nobody has noticed
yet
i don't like change
don't deal well
with upheaval
with letting go

even when it is needed

but at least there are words
and time has a way
of erasing memories

a year from now
no one will even remember
i once filled a chair
during the night shift

she says report, report, report it
i’m trying to tell her
how difficult it was
to even disclose to her
how my ribs
turned into seatbelts.

how i like my people emotionally unavailable. how much trouble they are. how much trouble i am. how i’m not trying to be difficult, i’m trying to look out for myself, because nobody else is going to except, maybe, my mother, but she can’t really do anything for me. how she asked if i was drinking because i was sad and i said no (i don’t know what i am. the drinking is coincidental.) how i’ve felt 21 since i was ******* 14. that time my friend said “i used to be a person” and i said “me, too.” how procedurals take advantage of people who don’t know any better, how they use them to explain things. the girl who had chad’s baby. diego && all the other names i love but can never use. feeling like someone’s inverse. intelligence. how tired i am; too tired to do this, to do anything. how to tell someone i’ve been preparing from/recovering from monday for whole days and i’m still not ready. how there has to be more than this, there has to be more than this, there has to be, there has to. my happiest moment, my saddest moment, the worst act of violence i have ever witnessed: katie in the bathroom with the butcher knife. a day i would live over and over again if i could (i don’t know what day. not today.) the word no. no, no, no. how that is the only word i can manage now. no, i didn’t sleep. no, i didn’t do anything. no, i didn’t get out of bed today. no. blow. a metaphor about my ribs turning into seatbelts. that time cameron drove without a license. something a man says in the street “she was young, wasn’t shah?” how he wanted my body so badly he took it from me. this sentence:

baby, you can get it back.