When you get used to being around someone,
you memorize where your things can't go,
(the cellphone on the windowsill, glass on the
dresser) because they -
the person that is -
and everything about them and with them and on them
occupy that space.
Their collective useless clean-up-after-me crap jams and crams and
fills themselves (maybe by magic, perhaps by fate)
into places where only you and the great clean air around you used to go,
and you want to **** them for taking over this sacred space - or at least tear
their throat a little with your teeth - their
***** underwear and the piles on piles of plastic freezie wrappers and
crumpled receipts
dig and claw their way into your skin. they burn and choke and burrow in
so deep
that
you
miss them when they're g n . But of course,
that isn't what you think of always. Not really.

Every under appreciated, suffocating action, every
dagger word, the electric pulse that tore through your skin because
they brushed up against the wrong part of you
(sometimes, unknowingly, the right part of you)
suddenly disappears with them.
And you, unforgotten, loved, have to stay.


and when they're gone their smell sticks to you
                                    for a little while.