Benches are wooden or plastic or metal but they allow for a connection, a meeting place for two people who somehow become connected and intertwined and woven, like the branches of trees; they grow on each other, something blooms between them and sprouts and you believe that you cannot live without the other person, they are your sunlight and your water and that soft bird that perches on your shoulder, they see your history, the rings of your trunk, all the years you spent wishing and hoping for that one person and then:

you meet on this bench, a piece of hand-crafted wood, in a park downtown, and you talk and you laugh and you make each other smile and you sit without talking and the silence is good... but then clouds form and the silence is unbearable and you feel like you want to explode and break and smash if the silence continues so you whisper and then talk and then yell and the heat brings you closer, you retrace all of those places, you look back on the map of your connection and remember all the landmarks that you saw and lived through together and it is as if no space existed as if your hearts grew and swelled for each other and brought you back and you lie and embrace and breathe again together and it's comfortable

but then you turn, he turns back, on it all, everything, and you try and search his face, look again on that map and try to remember, you make yourself remember but he sees another path near this bench, near you but not with you, and decides to walk down it and you want him to take your hand and ask you to go but you know deep, deep down that he won't, that he can't, so you try and you say those deadly, poisonous words, those three words that change everything whether you want it to or not
and he looks at you
and he sees you

but he can't take you with him
so he gets up and lifts one foot in front of the other and
he walks away from you.