Without you I often feel
Like a child who has lost her parents in a department store
And turns round and round
Waiting to be rediscovered and led back home.
It is a childlike feeling
In that it is so pure and intense
That it overwhelms everything else.
It's consuming,
This...lost, echoing sort of feeling,
This space inside me that calls
For you to be next to me and heal me.
It's the simple, gripping yearning
Of the child inside my heart
For connection
For tenderness
For contact-
To reach out and find purchase with my fingers
In the warmth of someone else's skin,
Someone I love,
Someone I trust.
Someone I miss,
Even when they are close.

Without you I often feel
Like a balloon that has been cut from its string
And left to wander through the stratosphere,
A lone black dot wavering above the treetops.
I have no control over where I am taken,
No way to reach out to where I've come from and say
"Wait, I want to go back."
I am adrift, in the most terrifying sense,
Emotionally floating through the emptiness of air,
Above all else but utterly alone.

I fear being away from you,
Is the truth,
Is the constant struggle.
I fear the mornings when your arms are not around my waist
And your breath isn't on my collarbone.
I fear the days when my hand isn't clasped in yours,
Tattooed in golden brown henna and entwined,
Fragile but steadying,
Like the rope that holds a ship fast and safe from the greedy fingers of the sea.
I fear the evenings when you aren't curled up beside me,
Your smooth voice telling me stories and ideas.
I fear the nights when I cannot look at your sleeping face
And feel the heartbreak cry out in my chest
Of loving every curve of it
In the halflight shadows
And seeing your skin glow gold
Against the velvet darkness.
I fear every second that you are not near me,
And that is why I feel so oddly lonely
In any tiny breath of a moment
That I am unoccupied.

Without you,
I'm not even entirely sure I exist.
Not properly,
Not like one should exist.
I think perhaps I pale a little,
Like a negative photograph,
Perhaps my edges become a little hazy
And the world bleeds into me and takes my light,
And my skin becomes a little transparent
So that if I stand before a streetlight in the rain
You can see the wet road through my back.
I think a little bit of my color drains,
And I become drab as a silverscreen movie,
Only projected upon the world and not
Really there.

No way of approaching how I feel without you
Can explain it fully,
And little flashes of what I mean dart across my vision like meteors.
I can try to equate it with something relatable,
Something tangible,
But the truth is that missing you transcends the words I've got to explain it.

I feel like a child, crying because she has realized what the word "alone" means.
I feel like a ship, cut adrift and floating through a mirror sky of sea
With no land in sight.
I feel like a worn out film reel
Ghost of an image hollographed against the world.
I feel like I've lost something
I couldn't live without.
My lungs, perhaps.
Maybe an artery,
Or the bones in my legs.
It feels wrong, to be without you.
And yet,
I am.
Without you,
I am...
Something.
But I'm not even sure I care to know
What.