The words swelled and I saw you / struggling that night / to keep them in
Your open mouth interrupted / the thoughts ebbing / pulled your lips closed
on the vacuum of the words that just vacated.
I had suspicions, and best left them / but it hurts me to see you, choking like this.
The words swelled up inside your mouth / begging, threatening,
Threatened all night to spill over your lips, and pour onto me.

I couldn’t watch you struggle to contain them any longer.

I gave you permission, and so you allowed yourself
And out came the words, sticky and plastic,
Dribbling out of your lips and into my ears

I wasn’t expecting them.
But they didn’t hurt.

I listened and tried to follow and found the symphony unfamiliar
Like an improvised song, turns happened unexpectedly
Parts of notes I’d anticipated would elsewhere skip place
I thought I knew this song; I didn’t know it at all.

My face is wet. But for once I’m not crying.
I feel the weight of the words trickle in broken stream, down my forehead, along my brows
Pooling at the edge of my face before bouncing off my eyelashes, on their way to my lips.
When they get there I can’t help but repeat them / your words, for myself
I have no words to offer you
I am flattered by the gift
I know that can be maddening.

I am too tired, have done too much, today, to deal
So I stay strong and swallowing, the taste of the statement slightly sweet
The sounded-out syllables dry on my lips
The bulk of them trapped in the back of my throat.
I tell you I’m strong, can be patient, can handle it
That I can as I have, keep good face and control myself
To not act with biases and to maintain control.
You insist you promise, this time you can do it
Just trust you, you’ll keep us protected you promise
Too tired, too desperate, (to believe it) / I believe you
No sooner placing that trust in your hands than it sprawled on the floor
In the tangle of all that followed / when I leaned back without its weight

The words spilled from your lips, and I caught them, as best I could
But you didn’t offer me a raincoat, or think of my feelings
So now I am cold, and wet. I just want to be warm.
Given the circumstances, this thing I can demand from you.

My cadavers in lab are not the only autopsy I’ve been performing
In this year since I’ve been free of you
In this year you’ve made a fool of me
For believing so wholly
In a future that depended on anything outside myself.

I take apart my patient and peer into what feels like my own heart
Trying to make sense of the connections
Trying to understand where anything fits in
When what I am looking it seems empty, drained long ago
Pooled into a somber puddle I’d drown in, literally behind me,
If not for the drainage vents, or lacrimal glands, installed for said overflow.

“We are dried out and lifeless together,” I think, forcing grim humor to compensate for the horrors of the visions I now see three times a week. “We know what it’s like to have a heart that doesn’t work anymore.” Maybe one of my classmates will be able to understand it better than me. I’m kidding—but don’t worry, this is why I’m in therapy.

In the end and like in medicine, I must come to accept
That there are things in life you can’t make sense of
There are things in life you must try to treat, without knowing the pathology
Without understanding what went wrong, truly
No matter how frustrating that may be.

The compromises that seemed so hard,
Seemed like pulling teeth, seemed so grinding, and difficult
Were quickly then made mandatory, dissolved in Zero
Zero, time together on the phone,
Zero visits to each other throughout our busy year
Zero balance between us to balance, as one grabbed or took slack.
For a situation that seemed so complicated you went ahead and made it simple—
There won’t be anything that needs sorting out—
There won’t be anything, of us, period.

So thank you, I guess, for teaching the natural conclusion;
Despite it feeling like I mimic, my now cardiac-lack friend,
The only heart that’s truly missing in the equation was yours
And mine, just hidden in the shadow from all the bruises,
Just has to learn to heal.

Love left me, for a day
And to myself I swore to stay
For if it was just dawn till dusk
It’s absence wouldn’t hurt too much
One day came to grow to two
When I first found me without you

I miss you in moments and movies and music that we once used to share
I miss you at events I'd have to beg to have you there
I miss the many magic moments that from life’s stress gave lenience
Even though now I see everything required your convenience

We’d introduced and then declared ourselves: serial monogamists
But after the breakup I saw this statement strangely ominous
This seeming dedication, to love, until the right was found
Would reveal itself as—for you—passion easily re-bound

It’s so rare to find a partner, your best friend, a man in one
No one else on earth with whom I’d ever hoped to have such fun
And you would write and say the things to me that made me melt
Only to realize sometime later they were things said--not felt

How ironic, silly, useless, and ungrateful of me, now
To scorn your absence when from tragedy it disavowed
I should be thanking you for cutting short the growing hurt
That surely I’d endure for years as your affection grew more curt

Thank you, I guess, for being self-servicing enough to leave me,
But for not being so much so to both in faith and life bereave me
For I did not lose you--the man I’ve loved and lost’s a ghost
A man you haven’t been long before departing from this coast

You can’t help someone through the hurt they don’t admit exists
You can’t help someone soothe a fight they claim you fought with fists
You can’t convince an independent that love takes work to flow
You can’t love someone out of habits they don’t think they must outgrow

*Every day I wake up feeling slightly less impacted by a truck.
I’m confident that one day I’ll find for whom my love is luck.

These slow songs crawl
under my skin, and itch
where you once kissed me

I’d try to make it stop
But I admit
I’m only as strong as I
convince myself that day

I’m made of steel
I’m made, of paper
that dissolves, to pulp, when wet

And lately, I feel like, my tears do the job
I’m falling apart when you’re not there…

I’d like to be, resilient, in the way
No one can make you be
That you become yourself

I’d like to be, as happy, as you once
Dared to make me when you took my hand
Cast me away, you wouldn’t have…

So play it off as old news, I don’t belong to you
I don’t know if I .. belong anywhere, actually
But don’t you dare say
I gave you away
You, were for me, the best in myself

Don’t let nostalgia
turn me a fool
I guess I’m already far gone

Don’t let your fears
cloud your hearing
No one else is calling my name

Except me….

[One day]
That will be enough.

That's what you are. And I can't articulate, because I'm not used to these feelings. I am not used to dragging out such light affections.

My work has been a treatment: for a sickness in my veins I'm desperate to abscond, because perhaps as ink the sad can haunt a jail whose bars are not my ribcage.

I have never used my skill to try and imprison a smile.

How could I anyway, bind with irony the freeing feeling that you give me? Release the helium that you are, and expect it to behave? No paper dares to catch you. No letter, no camera. It is a fundamental conflict between mediums: the joy of limitlessness against the object or pen loyal to the finite, captured world.

Perhaps it would be different, had you installed lesser gusto in me. As it stands, my discipline fell with a vow to seek life without constraint. This year I have been learning; I have been more open, I have been happier.

And with you, I feel infinite.