Shes been waking me up in the middle of the night lately.
She pulls my hair in the early hours of the morning, beats the sleep out of me, like an angry sibling, all elbows and knees, a halo of messy hair, all because she needs to thread her fingers into mine, and tell me the stars are calling her home, calling her skyward.

And I laugh at her.

Because she doesn't understand the science of astrology or how the atoms that make up her being, are that of stars, and all she has to do is close her eyes to be home.

She hates when I laugh at her.

She waits restlessly, with hands bent tight around pens with black and blue ink, she begs me to give the paper bruises.
But I tell her I'm too busy.
Push her away, out of me, and back into herself.

She hates being alone.

She smiles at me, and brings me indigo flower beds and lilacs to rest my head on.
Shes been bending over backwards, writing our initials in the sand for so long now, fingers tripping over one another in the beaches of sand,
sand once held in hour glasses,
measuring out how many seconds and hours, days and weeks we have left with one another.

She tells me I am wasting this youth that I have, on dollar bills and proper sleeping habits.

She says artists don't need sleep.

She pulls me, sideways out of myself and tells me that she's leaving.

She wears red lipstick and climbs into the back of a big yellow cab, and writes a song about it. Sings it to me, when she slams the door.

She says I didn't appreciate her.

She just doesn't understand that the dust in my skeleton is shuddering, quaking, breathing and breaking.
Begging to be stirred up, swallowed down, and to devour something new.
She doesn't understand that I am in love with her, and the thousands of intricate patterns her fingertips could trace on blank canvases.

She has no idea that I will be irrevocably lost without her, with no map to guide me, or guide to find me.

She doesn't know that without her, I am nothing.

She doesn't know that I need her.