Your car
is my own personal
spaceship, hurtling
through galaxies --
billboard planets
and streetlight stars

The city
doesn't sleep
so much as it snores
this early in the morning,
piles of buildings
stacked together carelessly
across the skyline

My legs
curled beneath me,
an insect shriveling
back into her cocoon,
we don't speak
only discontinuing silence

You retreat
into your shell
before I can speak
a word of the truth
that is congealed
in my chest, a
cancerous mass
that is sure
to stop my breath

This night,
it hasn't broken me
so much as it has
brought me back to life,
soon I'll remember how
warm a person's eyes get
after they've been so cold
for such a long time

We whisper
under our breaths,
fumbling to connect
with sentences strung out
across a wire between
our ears, cans pressed tight

And now,
my house looming
before me, a
swirling black hole
that swallows me whole,
your headlights barely
a spark in the distance

I wish
more than anything
that I could follow you
back home, curl with you
until this ache has left
from my bones

But if I did,
I know it would be
different than we thought
Your quiet mouth would
change beneath mine
and I know, you would never
stop until you understood why

this blooming pressure
tears at my lungs
until I can breathe again