i think when i let you leave i let you leave with too much of me. i woke this morning and called the color teal green. i drank my coffee black instead of with cream. i struggled at work trying not to daydream about whtie picket fences and sunshine and even lawns. i went to the beach to watch the gulls and i never shared one bit of my sandwich; which was peanut butter with jelly instead of honey. you swore when you left i'd be a different person without you and you were right excpet for the implication that i would be better. you stole my laughter and my breath while you were here, but did not return them when you left and now i wake up gasping for air in the middle of the night and weep myself back to sleep. others would say i have become a shell of the woman i once was but i don't agree with that analogy. you were my shell, encrusted with jewels of knowledge and worldliness and creativity and you covered me with it. i didn' know before you left but i know now and i cannot stand the sound of the ocean anymore. i'd ask you to come back but it would be only to steal away your shell and mask this hollow body. and i don' want to do that to you. you're too beautiful to hurt again.

there was a time before I left the town we called home where I would visit you every day, repeatedly approaching you with a proposition to leave with me and never come back. you, being afraid of any change were always so quick to change the subject and it took all of my self-control not to scream at you “do you not love me?” over and over and over until the words were echoes in your head and then maybe you would listen to them. but I never did and that was what I congratulated myself on every morning I stood patiently on your doorstep, and every single **** time I left, I told myself what a wondrous person I was thinking only of you…knowing you wanted that and needed that because you were a self-centered hole and I was a gift basket. after a while I stopped visiting and then eventually I was gone and you were more than a memory but less than my past. the first few months we wrote letters twice a week and I congratulate us on that also because it meant we were taking time out of our lives to think of each other, and it did take time because your letters would be pages and pages long. but it couldn’t last forever and I wasn’t surprised when it became once a week and then once every two weeks and then by the tenth month of us writing letters I hadn’t gotten one from you for two months. so I sent back one letter on one piece of paper, cardstock, with one word spelt out in my best calligraphy with a pen my new boyfriend had bought me…I wrote goodbye and sent that letter to you. I’m hoping you realize that by me spending time writing that goodbye I still care about you, I still want you to think of me as a decent person and not awful ex you couldn’t stand. I don’t want your tongue and breath to go bitter when you say my name because someone who is not a close friend has asked of my whereabouts and you have to answer. I don’t want that but I suppose if that’s how you feel then I cannot change that mind of yours, because I’ve never been able to before. you are stubborn and I do not miss seeing you but I miss the sound of your easy breathing as we lay watching a movie. my new boyfriends breathing is too harsh and we do not watch movies we only *****. I guess it’s nice when he’s sleeping but he never wants to hold me “I’m too hot” is what he always tells me, trying to cover it up with a lilt in his voice like he means it as a compliment when I know he’s very serious. I don’t want you back so don’t think that to be the reason I’ve wrote you back after so long. I just happened along a shoebox full of these things and it made me wonder and it made me cry but I never felt fuller than when I covered that box in gasoline, lit it, and watched in burn fast in the parking lot of my new ex-boyfriends yard.

He was like a plastic bag, but the
non-translucent kind...
the kind that you could call foggy
The kind that you didn't know the contents of until you reached in and pulled them out
With him you had to be smart enough
to check what you were pulling out first or there could be a fight
He was not the type to accept impatience
Especially if he was the one being rushed
If it was raining you could be sure he wanted to sit in it
Not sing, or dance, or run
Just sit in the grass and let the raindrops trickle down his neck
That's how patient he was
Until he met me
I begged, maybe too much in the beginning but I was always
"Go, go, go" when he was ready to rest and I did not catch his initial irritation
I did not pay attention to his needs but he worked overtime attending to mine
and that's what made him the most patient in the beginning
It was not our love or my running that got old
No, it was some greater force
Like the one between two magnets driving us further apart
the closer we tried to get
The day he lost his patience with me was the day I found my ignorance and recognized my wrongs
Though I did not correct or accept either
And he walked away with no regrets while I tried to figure this empty feeling I think he left
But I couldn't be sure because I never felt full with him here
I never felt full but I emptied him out
I pulled all the items out the plastic bag
without looking first

what's sugar taste like when you taste it on someone else's lips? does it taste sweet when you're in love? like deceit when you're in love with someone else? would it make a difference if my lips were covered with honey? sticky unconscious telling me not to press my lips too tight because the words I have tingling on my tongue are too important to be trapped behind porcelain teeth. if you're raised to always love unconditionally how does it feel to love someone who was raised not knowing what it felt like to be held? all this feeling and emotion and I wonder if this was a trap laid set for us. because how cruel is it to give us the power to feel love but not to feel loved. to only feel doubt when someone whispers sweet nothings in our ear as we lay staring at blank walls that just almost depict the walls of our hearts. could we muster up the energy to bleed ourselves onto each other...is that a normal way to express gratuity for an equal exchange of attraction?  how do we show love if we can't love ourselves? if we love ourselves too much how do we find an infinitesimal amount to give away to someone who could need it desperately? are we yet sweet enough to try? so again I ask you, what's sugar taste like when you taste it on someone else's lips?