“I don’t know,” he said.
As I lay my head on his chest, I hold my breath to ever speak again.
And suddenly, I could feel the space between our atoms.

What should I eat?
A simple questions, but I only have one recipient in mind.
Only one person who knows me enough to know what I want when I don’t know it myself.
One person who knows what I ate yesterday, and the day before and narrows it down from there.
But, you don’t know what I ate yesterday.
Because I didn’t.
I ate my pillow and drank my tears.
The salt and cotton sat in my stomach like the butterflies used to.
But, those butterflied never died, they just got hurt.
Had their wings plucked off and bodies scorched with a magnifying glass.

I want you to like yourself as much as I do.
I want to like myself as much as I liked you.
I want to nurse you and those butterflies back to life one day.
Release them in the botanical garden and start a new holiday.

162 days until it’s all over and done with; real life starts then.
For now, I will play pretend.
Hide these feelings in the empty boxes I hoard under my bed.
Not to think about the empty spot in your heart and head,
where there was no room for me.

When I came home, everything was changed.
I found you to nurse and hold me, until love replaced the pain.
But with you, I was just hiding from it.
Like the boxes under my bed, I hide from their emptiness.
I hide from the raw meat body that used to take up half my spaces.

I have no foundation in this far too familiar nation.
Busy bodies twirling like ants from different colonies.
We will not go home to the same place tonight.