I miss you so much.

I miss the way the skin of your back felt when I scratched it.
I miss the way you made me feel,
The way you make me feel when I think about you twitching before falling asleep.
I giggle,
swallow
the simplicity of the yearning weight on my chest. Like I'm fighting for every second of the breath that I hold,
Like I am about to fall off the flat pre-humanistic Earth of a world that
never existed like it used to with
faith.

But now I can't feel anything.

So I play game after game solitaire just to fill the days without you.
It really is a losing game.
The odds are against me.
And so I reset my record
because the probability of winning is smaller with every hand,
because I'm smart enough to know, that's the way statistics work.

But I have to ask,

Does your back itch like a phantom limb?

My fingernails still crawl for your skin.
And for the crunch and cringe of sand
in my mouth after you've played too many hours of volleyball and it is soaked in your hair.
I want to feel the blisters of your sunburned back
and still believe with my whole heart that it is
perfect and peeling
under my nails.

I will take your flaws, I said.

Your ****** salsa is delicious, I said.

I hope you feel that burn
of jalapeños when you forget to
wash your hands.

I want you to know that I am pulling the painfully heavy yoke of the sweaty memories on my bed sheets.
Of ice melting in the grass.

I want you to know that I made a list of things that I absolutely hate about you,
but I still feel the warmth of that perfect week when you were fevered and deliriously content with me.

When I sit on the porch, I think I can hear your long board on the sharp asphalt. Like you're rounding the corner,
the cacophony
of your snoring over the
unbound bonding.

I remember how you liked that word. See?

I want you to know that when I miss you this badly,
I imagine you sleeping on that park bench in France and that pain turns bittersweet under the syntax of stars in a distant country.

And I will probably still send you this poem because I want you
to tell me that I am a good poet, because you never told me enough.

And then I want you to read it
again and again.

I want to keep THIS connection
because I believe in words
more than I ever believed in us.

I want that sentence to leave you scratching your head.
Like I just called your bluff.

I still laugh at your jokes.
And then tell myself that I never met you.
I reset my statistics until I have the upper-hand.

Because I know that this too shall pass,
but you need to know that I still look out my window when a car passes and hope that you may suddenly awaken to a knock knock at your front door.

I said that I was falling.
But I have not built enough callous on my heels from our walks to the hot tub in Spring's early light.

I want you to feel this scar
you failed to talk me out of inflicting.
What it's like to feel guilty.
What it's like to feel its tickling weight.

I don't want your callous.
I want to feel
my feet on the ground of an earth that's round
and realistic.
But most of all, I want to thank you for showing me that I still got this.
That I still have words, even if
I don't have you.

But what I wanted to say
most is