the sunset looks different from the windows on the tall city bus
than it does from the windshield of my car.
when I drive, it's simply a rosy hue that covers the earth
and escapes behind the mountaintops in an instant.

I forgot how slowly the color saturates the grass,
and how the dusk rolls over the hillside
like waves over a sleepy shoreline,
covering the world in a blanket of pink.
I don't take my eyes off of it,
I can't,
but suddenly the blanket is a tent pitched over the earth and it's
soft and blue and gray,
like a still, silent night in a 50s Hallmark film--
devoid of all color, but not of warmth
or nostalgia, that familiarity that reminds me of you...

you're different to me when you're not physically here.
I can't recall how it feels to fold my fingers over yours
or to gently graze my lips back and forth over your cheek
while you speak
until you give in and kiss them.

you are a faraway face on a bright screen
and messages opened but never truly read.
the home you had made in my heart is vacant
and cold, freezing,
frozen in my memory and fading every day that I drive home
speeding blindly through a world full of color and change,
unable to remember what it's like to watch the sky slowly dissolve
into the earth