Sometimes, some days, like on a train from New York to Waterbury with a crying baby, or on your lap in a taxi driving to the apartment, I can see you staring at me in a way that feels like adoration, and it’s something I now have that I’ve always waited for.

1.
Did you
ever
think of
me
as
a happy girl?
Or
was I
continuously
such a
sad
and desperate
thing?

2.**
Is it
still true?
What
you
wrote that day
about
me
being brave?

This is a place where sleeping is hard. This is a bed, on which, I lay my skull and it opens up, not to soft dreams; instead, to loud, forgotten thoughts. I am thankful for one hour of eyes closing. Two or more, at this point-- four sleepless nights in-- is a ******* blessing. When I open my bedroom window to the sunrise that I raced and beat, the air tastes like cowboys' dreams: all wide and free. It’s baby-blue and almost-purple and a shade of blushing-pink: all the colors that make me feel new and innocent: feelings I wish I felt. I watched my cat sleep by our knees, but she gets up with the sun today, just like me. There is an empty, quiet fireplace, one story and twenty steps below my heels. I want to put a log in and allow my body rest next to its warmth on the floor, but someone has been on the couch since last night. Today is Christmas and I feel lost in thought and wakefulness. Is it okay to say my heart is breaking? Because the stitches are coming out for a third time, and I’m afraid to tell.

I’ve been chasing this for almost one whole year
with little breaks of lust
tucked in between

The corners of those dates
have dogfolded ears
which stick out to me like a quenched oak tree
in a wide, dry desert

The short pieces
that once formed our long lull
feel nothing close to my feet
coming to a stop,
turning around,
feeling kept—purposefully

My calves are knotted
and my eyelids become cracked
from chasing the Black Hole in the sky:
the hole that used to be the Brightest Sun,
My Sun, the one that I once spoke of
so sweetly:

*“It’s different from theirs
on another planet, it never sets.
There is a light with the nights-- always.

The need to search or ask for love is lost, because so much is given.

And even when I move to a new planet,
where the sun sets and rises
as the moon ascends; loneliness climbing onto its back,
its dark qualities, bordering me,
it will not receive me.

because My Sun is still bright in my mind.”

His bed was one of my favorite things; it had no box spring to hold it up, just a mattress on the floor with a giant, lumpy comforter covering our almost-naked bodies. I slept on the left side of the bed where his heater sat on the wall, loudly pumping out warm air. When lying still we could hear the quiet scratching and tapping of little mice scurrying through the walls around us. A part of me hated thinking of waking up to a mouse sitting on my chest, but another part liked the thought that mice lived around his bed, like a little mouse mansion.

How smooth his skin was… the nicest I’ve ever felt, like a baby’s, untouched and unharmed. I liked biting his perfect skin; I liked being able to look at the purple and red marks and the feelings they gave me—the feelings that he was mine; I had damaged him that way. When I ran my hands through his chin-length hair it would feel sticky with remnants of the gel that held it in place the night before.

He’d lie on top of me with his smoothness and his stickiness, and the silver necklace he always wore would hang down, cold on my bare chest. He’d wake me up like that and hand me a cup of tea with lemon, which I hated, and then a plate of breakfast, which I loved. We’d put on a movie, keeping the white blinds closed over the window, even though the Saturday winter sun beamed through, telling us it was time to start the day.

Two nights ago I sat above the new apartment sign, my naked body dangling on its brick-laid edge. Cramped lights seared the parts of my legs they touched and it reminded me of watching pieces of fish in the oven. A breeze skated across my upper arm and ******, making me cold but awakening warm memories, ones taken from the house in the city that I cannot outrun. The fingers on my right hand prodded a cigarette into the crack of my lips as I tried to remember those four numbers, 37 and 62, and the circumstances under which I had deemed myself happy.

It seemed that we were almost-always-unabashedly *******, or at least I was, but there was that thoroughly **** time-- the night at the lake. Graceless games of Truth or Dare escorted shots of ***** into our mouths and conducted secrets out. Bottles’ tin caps clicked open as we split the clear contents inside, shook the smaller one, held it to the nose, waited for the levels of our laughter to rise like specs in the night sky: Pop, pop, pop! Up and up we went, watching down below, leaving life behind, fading away like the dimmed city stars.

I pulled the cigarette out of my mouth, releasing the white smoke. My mind searched for a time in life when smiling had come so easily, but the answer stayed the same.