I grew up in the cabbage patch,
224 rows of deep roots to care for.

You were born on the first boat your father ever owned,
and his father before that.

Two legacies that would never intertwine.
Oil on sea.

I had two sisters and one brother and we were all destined for the same life of dirt and hard work and fresh baked pies.

Your only child complex made you a trophy son to all your fathers drinking buddies. You swore you could almost smell his pride leaking out his mouth when he would talk about the fish you caught together the past weekend.

I walked in narrow steps with hunched shoulders and I was just trying to find the elevator when you turned my whole existence upside down with your shoulders back, head held high wide stride.

I wanted to gather myself and run away, I would have rather been anywhere but in front of you. My feet were glued to the ground and I couldn't tell up from down or day from night all I could see was your soft hair and your soft skin and your round eyes and the way they looked at me like no one had ever looked at me before.

You were the high tide and I was a cesspool. You came and went as you pleased and what you gave to me in passing I would hold on to for years. I lay stagnant and fermenting in my own thoughts and you had the entire ocean in your fingertips.

I watched quietly as you sped through mania and love-stricken grief. I would watch you start to unwind and dismantle and I would hold my breath as you forced yourself to shatter. No other cause than the wind was too cold or you were scared of the way it sounded when you talked about your future.

I would silently crumble and help you pick up the pieces of yourself and watch, amazed, at the speed in which you could put yourself back together.

We shared a bed and a home and, for a time, a name. We spoke without words and made memories that gathered dust on a shelf.

I loved the silence of snow and frozen ground, you missed warm sand and couldn't stand being away from the sea.

We were unfolding and our shaky foundation had holes that were now too large for me to patch.

We used to sit and talk for hours about nothing at all. Now it's four in the morning and I haven't heard your voice in over three years.

You once told me that we were blight. We tore away at each other until we were empty stalks on a poisoned field.

When you finally left I sat on our front porch steps for almost the rest of the night. I never cried or fell apart, just stared down the dirt road trying to figure out where we went wrong, or if we ever did anything right.

I think some older part of me now believes that we were always in this kind of delusional state. Kidding ourselves with promises to each other about  a future that was built on ash.

I missed my sisters and I sold the house and when I went back to my family's farm the dirt just reminded me of you.

I spent the first night in my old room crying and shaking the bed frame until my chest felt tight and hallow and I heaved from my stomach a kind of sadness I didn't know someone could have. My mouth tasted like ***** and lavender and your shoulders and I threw up until I could only ******* own decay.

I knew the sound of your footsteps, your tossing and turning, your starting to spiral down voice, your hurried walk, your fingers in my hair. It took me so long to try and unlearn these things but even gin couldn't drown you out of my head.

In spring things got better, because my sister had a baby with fat cheeks and small hands and she named her Anna and when she would cry at night I would sometimes go in there and cry with her.

I think about the boy with the ocean in his fingertips, and my silence on his tongue and I whisper to Anna that people are messy and I'm sorry she has to learn this someday.

I look down a different dirt road and wonder if I'll ever see your soft curls again. I wonder if you've found another person in this world, and if she is as plain compared to you as I was. She probably is. I wonder if you're running your fathers fishing business like you said you were going to, like you always knew you were meant too. I wonder if the sea smells exactly like you remember. I wonder if you're happy. If your fits of self-destruction have stopped, if you're still scared of being alone.

You were the whole ocean and I was just a girl. I didn't know how to be with you anymore than you knew how to be with me. I watched you in awe and I think I always knew we were never meant to last.

We were cracking from the start, but man, the way we shattered was beautiful.