if i could swallow amnesia like a pill,
i might just have to;
because i walk a fragile line between
forever and never,
and i’m about to lose my balance.
you are a cliche i refused to be a part of,
until you opened your mouth
and out fell the christmas lights,
the rainbow decadence of promise,
though what you were promising wasn’t so much
what i wanted as what i desired,
and even with the tickle of warning behind my veins
as they quickened in blood flow,
i thought for a moment maybe i could be worth something
you didn’t outright say i could be.

and i wasn’t surprised when it all took a note from the challenger
and exploded in my sky,
but i cannot say my body did not seize and shake,
my tongue did not swell until i was choking on it.
it’s hard to understand though, because i’m not in love with you.
i know i’m not; everything i felt was merely an exaggerated carbon copy
of what you professed you felt,
and yet it’s me who tasted salt twice in one day, not you.
you didn’t promise to love me in that way,
merely promised to graze my thighs with a tongue so strong
i could forget for a minute the reason why i said no
to being friends with benefits in the first place.

i think it’s not so much that i’m in love with you as
i think it’s because i’m used to being the second best thing
someone could have,
the not-quite option, the good but not good enough version
of what is so keenly desired by beating teenage hearts.
no one wants to be the second person that gets told good news,
the second person that gets invited out when the first cannot go.
i think it’s not so much that i’m in love with you as i love you,
beyond hormones and beyond friendship.
because there’s something between us that
is wholly poetic but cannot be melted down
into the human catastrophe of words.
and i just want to know that you believe the same.

truly, i feel as if you are my person,
and not in the sense that i will see us lying hand-in-hand
at the mantle of our graves with lips tied together;
i haven’t found that person yet.
i mean in the sense that we are the twins of a different mother,
we are the soulmates who don’t need to touch unclothed to feel
intimacy.
we are the best friends who go beyond that definition,
and i don’t know if i romanticize everything until it tastes too sweet to swallow,
but i love you a lot and i don’t want to lose you.
i don’t want to be your second,
and not because there is sugar in your lips
but because there are storm clouds in your soul,
and i’d regret losing someone who could understand
why our skies look so much the same.